Wikipedia:Don't call it "Wiki"



In 1995 two men escaped from a prison in Utah. They apparently weren't the brightest bulbs in that they were only four months away from being released anyway – and the escape made them eligible for another fifteen years of rest and relaxation. ("Anybody who escapes with that little time left can't be very smart," said a spokesman for the Utah Department of Corrections.) But I digress.

Anyway, somehow these guys made their way to Berkeley, California (across the San Francisco Bay from, well, San Francisco), where two policemen found them sleeping under a tree. They might have talked their way out of the situation had they not made one critical mistake: telling the officers, when questioned, that they were "from Frisco" – thereby using "the one word sure to identify them as tourists or rubes", as the San Francisco Examiner put it. "It made our officers suspicious," said a police official. "No one from here ever says that."

Wikipedia is probably the most famous example of a wiki, so out in the greater world there are people who refer to Wikipedia simply as "Wiki". While no one who actually volunteers on this encyclopedia-building project calls it that, it is an unavoidable fact that there is a whole host of people who interact with the site in various ways while not knowing that it is an encyclopedia. An appreciably-sized subset are those who don't even have the underlying comprehension of what an encyclopedia is, in general (may have heard the word, but don't know very well what it means, and may never have seen another encyclopedia); another subset are people who understand that there is an association between the "&#8209;pedia" part of the name and "encyclopedia", but think that this is just figurative – i.e. that Wikipedia, while it maybe shares some traits with encyclopedias, is still something essentially different from a literal, real, one; yet another subset are people who, while they do actually get that this is a real encyclopedia, see the "anyone can edit" precept, encapsulated in the "Wiki" part of the name, as something not integral, but parallel to that, so that while Wikipedia is primarily an encyclopedia, it can also be whatever they think they need it for. Once such users have, with a high degree of probability, identified themselves through incorrect usage of "Wiki", they need to be told that Wikipedia is a (very real and literal) encyclopedia and nothing but that. At the end, some of them may never understand the project, might not be able to scale the learning curve, and this should be responded to appropriately.