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Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

Since this is a thread about pedantry (rocketry pedantry), I'll allow myself to be pedantic about words.

"A wiki" is a type of software. But when you use "Wiki" as a proper noun, referring to one specific instance, that's the name of Ward's Wiki, the original wiki, also known as wikiwikiweb, available at wiki.c2.com .

I'm guessing that you were not citing Ward's Wiki, but were rather citing some other site, in particular the site that contains this advice on citing it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_abbreviate_%...!

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You should note the banner at the top of your reference:

> This is a humorous essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not 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 essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.

The humor tag is there because the community is self-aware that it's mildly pedantic. The views of the essay are held by a strong majority of the community at least. Nobody ever abbreviates Wikipedia as "wiki"; we have far too many wikis floating around and it would be confusing.

While we're at pedantry, English is a descriptivist language... I guarantee you that when I say "the wiki", approximately nobody thinks of Ward's.

(Yes, I think Wikipedia's Don't Abbreviate... page is just wrong about this.)

It's entirely context dependent. For me and the people I deal with (which deal with various wikis in our lives for both work and play), "the wiki" refers to the specialized wiki on the topic we are speaking (for work it's the work wiki, for the game were playing it's the wiki for the game, etc), and Wikipedia is used to refer to Wikipedia, because it's not specific to anything. If someone just mentioned "the wiki" or "wiki says" in a conversation and was intending to imply Wikipedia, it would just confuse me by making me think there's some specific wiki they were referring to that I missed previously or they weren't clear in communicating, unless we were specifically referring to Wikipedia earlier.

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