Wikipedia:Don't call it "Wiki"
 | This is an essay on editors who refer to Wikipedia as "Wiki". It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Editors who say stuff like "Wiki should do this" and "I'm trying to improve Wiki" are usually trouble |
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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."[1]
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,[a] 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 "‑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.
For example edit
The purpose of Wiki is to portray an accurate story of prominent people or a version of events. My two records are official records- one is a census return and the other is a U.S. Army record. Surely, they are legit.
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Hi, I work for Sally C Morton of ASU Knowledge Enterprise. We are editing her page and have not completed it. I received a message that you removed the content due to citations. We are not done editing the page and several hours of content where removed by you. How can we have that info placed back into Sally's Wiki?
— Special:PermanentLink/1025360325
Why isn't my wiki profile and bio not appearing online when I do a name search?
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See also edit
- Wikipedia:Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"!, a different essay about the same phenomenon, that also explores proper usage of "wiki"
- Wikipedia:Assume no clue
Footnotes edit
- ^ This applies only to the specific form wiki (alone, as a noun, whether capitalized or not – so note that phrases such as the wiki software don't qualify); perhaps paradoxically, terms like enwiki and en-wiki and enwp and so on are apparently unrelated, and are in fact inside-baseball terms used by elite editors. The jury's still out on The Wiki.
- ^ Jim Herron Zamora (September 5, 1995). ""Frisco"? You're under arrest". SFgate.