That’s a fine GQ account of what a wiki is, but not how language works. You’re stating a personal opinion that “Wiki” should not be used to mean “Wikipedia” in general usage, when the GQ empirical reality is that the usage is widespread.
You haven’t even really stated any convincing prescriptivist objection to it. Wikipedia has a dominant position, it’s used daily by many people, and it’s a long word with a lot of syllables - so it’s naturally going to tend to be abbreviated. In speech, it’s reasonable in a general context to assume that you’re talking specifically about Wikipedia if you say something like “a Wiki article” unless you specify otherwise. In writing the capitalization helps clarify the difference. Seems quite sensible to me.
You have failed to make the case that it is referred to overwhelmingly as “Wiki” rather than “Wikipedia”. It’s your reality, and it’s not true because you state it is so. Where is your empirical evidence?
A wiki is a particular thing, you can get wiki software and set up your own wiki (I’ve even done so in the past):
Misusing the term because you think “everybody does it” on a board that seeks to give factual answers and educate people is counterproductive.
You’ve distorted my claim here to an irrelevant one, and I think you know that, because my actual claim is rather obviously true. Why would one expression need to be “overwhelmingly” more common than an alternative in order for you to acknowledge that it’s common usage? Are we only allowed one way to say things in English? What I actually said was that the abbreviation was widespread in common usage. If you insist on a cite:
I just searched for Wiki/wiki (without cap sensitivity) in SDMB posts. Excluding this thread, there are 20 instances since 1/31. Unsurprisingly, in every case it’s used as an abbreviation for Wikipedia.
To say that it is “misuse” is begging the question.
It might well be that in more technical contexts the abbreviation is prescriptively deprecated. I don’t dispute that - it appears in Wikipedia’s own usage guidelines.
And you’re perfectly welcome to express your prescriptive opinion that the abbreviation is unwelcome in general non-technical usage too. I might even be talked around to your opinion, if you can make a case.
But you still haven’t given any justification for that view. Care to respond to what I said here (and I’m talking about general, non-technical contexts):
But in any event, what is “correct” in a language is not determined by your personal prescriptive preferences or mine, it’s determined by empirical consensus usage. As a GQ matter, the objective state of the English language is that Wiki is a very commonly used abbreviation for Wikipedia.
Except there’s no good replacement for “American” as a demonym: There’s Canadian and Mexican and… what? What else can we use for the people who live in The United States of America which has popular uptake? Insisting upon or even demanding nonce terms like “Usonian” or “United Statesian” makes you a fool, and suggesting that some countries not have demonyms is similarly idiotic.
I didn’t claim it only means Wikipedia. I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise, but what’s your response to what I said in post #21? I’m always highly skeptical of the common prescriptivist claim that some novel usage will result in irresolvable ambiguity. In general conversation, most people most of the time refer to Wikipedia vastly more often than any other wiki. What’s the problem with assuming that it means Wikipedia unless otherwise specified or made clear by context? I mean, you just got the idea across quite easily.
We’ve had a number of threads on this in the past. I just posted about it the other day in a thread because I had just seen Fox news for the first time in years, and it struck me that one of the first talking heads spewing nonsense obviously made a point of using “Democrat Party”. I was a little surprised there are still people who apparently find it witty or cutting.
I’ve found it a consistent rule of thumb that anyone who says that as a pejorative is probably not worth listening to.
There is one particular conservative poster on this board who regularly uses “Democrat Party,” and it’s pretty clear to me that he does so very intentionally.
Hmm. Most organization at the level of a national party are organized, incorporated, have registered name and trademark it etc. If the name is “The Democratic Party” then that’s the correct name. Common usage dictates what is an appropriate nickname.
Frankly this is the first time I’ve noticed the distinction. I’m sure I’ve heard Democrat Party, I must have, but it’s never registered before; it just doesn’t sound right. I have heard members called (big D) Democrat’s, that’s common usage and an understandable abbreviation.
BTW I’ve also heard America referred to in shorthand as The United States or “the US” despite IIRC there being a neighbor called “The United States of Mexico”. The fact that the founding fathers had either grand visions or lack of imagination leads to lack of alternative names. At least they didn’t jam together the individual names, I’m trying to imagine a 13 to 50 syllable version of a name like “Brangelina”.
I used to write “Democrat Party” out of ignorance myself, but corrected this when I learned the correct term.
What irritates are people who know that “Democrat Party” is an epithet and deliberately use it for that reason. There are at least a few Dopers who are corrected here at SDMB and then deliberately continue to use the term. I think some have bragged that they do so precisely to annoy.
It demonstrates something sad about their political affiliation when a key tenet of their “ideology” seems to be juvenile pranks intended to irritate adult Americans.
Using a noun to modify another noun is one of the most basic characteristics of English lexicon. The first noun (or the “adjunct noun”) functionally serves as an adjective, but the phrase as a whole is usually just referred to as a “compound noun.” (Whether the two words are written with a space–or hyphen–between them or not usually isn’t relevant here.)
That said, this particular use of democrat as a adjunct noun has a particular historical context, as cited above, which sets it apart.
