[Foundation-l] Re: Personal research grant collaboration request

Sat Jul 31 04:41:50 UTC 2004

Good observation. I've been using Wikipedia and Wikipedias.  The
reasoning for this is because Wikipedia is a brand, rather than a
concept (that is, the name is more similar to "Yahoo" than it is to
"weblog").

One problem with using lower case "wikipedia" is that people tend to
think of it as a generic concept, such that we have seen folks
erroneously use the term "wikipedia" or "Wikipedia."  For an example,
see:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-May/000213.html

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 23:58:21 -0400, Chitu Okoli
<cokoli at jmsb.concordia.ca> wrote:
> By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs.
> "wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for
> capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other
> languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are
> many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one
> such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For
> instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but
> the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun
> should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring
> to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small
> letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
> 
> By this rule, I would think that "wikipedia" (small letters) should refer to
> any of various language wikipedias (e.g. de.wikipedia.org and
> zh.wikipedia.org), whereas "Wikipedia" (capitalized) should refer to the big
> mama that comprises all the daughter wikipedias (the Wikipedia should be
> www.wikipedia.org, though that link automatically points to the wikipedia at
> en.wikipedia.org, I guess because that one was the first, and is the largest
> and the most visited).
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com