Forum:Wikia is plural of Wikia

I'm combining some comments from Talk:Featured Wikia and my talk page into one place below. Please add new thoughts on whether "Wikia" being the plural of "Wikia" is too much of a problem. Note that we don't own wikias.com, so using "Wikias" as a plural might lead to people using the wrong URL. Angela (talk) 09:58, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Sometimes "Wikia" gets used as though it is the plural of wiki. But, AFAIK, Wikia is the organization that runs this agglomeration of wikis. I know that we have to differentiate Wikia wikis from the general run of the mill wikis out there on the Internet, but wouldn't it be better to say "Wikia wikis," or "Wikis on Wikia?" Reason I ask is that there seems to be considerable confusion. People have taken to calling wikis "wikia" and it is sometimes hard to figure out what's what. Adding to the confusion, is that we have headings such as "Featured Wikia" and "List of Wikia."

I propose that we rename these two pages as follows:


 * Featured Wikia --> Featured wikis on Wikia
 * List of Wikia --> List of Wikis on Wikia

Comments? Michael 20:10, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Or we could rename this page "Featured wikis." It should be obvious that Wikia would feature Wikia wikis. Michael 17:55, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

To restate, in case the above wasn't clear: I think that we should differentiate between "Wikia" (an organization that hosts wikis) and "wiki" (a collaborative authoring medium used by a particular group). Michael 23:38, 12 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with you. The company name recently changed from "Wikicities" to "Wikia", and when that happened, it was announced that "Wikia" was the name of the company, the name for an individual wiki, and the plural form as well. I find it confusing, and I tend to ignore it in common speech.


 * I would much prefer it if we referred to each wiki as a wiki. -- Danny (talk ) 19:02, 13 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Wikis on Wikia are called Wikia. I think this will start to make more sense in future when Wikia starts to offer more than a simple wiki, and the distinction between the two is more obvious. It also distinguishes between simply any wiki on a topic and the ones that are here. The wikis featured on this page are very much featured Wikia, not just featured wikis, since we only ever feature ones that are hosted on wikia.com. Angela (talk) 05:07, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

No question that they are Wikia wikis. But you seem to be saying that there are three meanings of the word "Wikia." If I understand correctly, we have:
 * Wikia - an organization that hosts Wikia
 * Wikia - the entities hosted by Wikia
 * Wikia - an individual Wikia on Wikia.

Thus one might say: "Each wikia is one of many wikia on Wikia." Have I got that right? Michael 05:56, 14 August 2006 (UTC)


 * One way of solving this lack of clarity would be to rename this page "Featured on Wikia." Thoughts? Michael 16:48, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

My concern is with the language. If we call individual Wikia wikis "Wikia," and also use expressions like "Featured Wikia" or "List of Wikia (plural), it seems to me that there will be three meanings of the word:


 * Wikia - an organization that hosts Wikia
 * Wikia - the entities hosted by Wikia
 * Wikia - an individual Wikia on Wikia.

The following sentence, I think illustrates the lack of clarity that will ensue:


 * I participate in a Wikia that is one of many Wikia on Wikia.

Do you see the problem? As an editor, I think there may other ways of ensuring that Wikia wikis are seen as unique and special. Michael 14:51, 15 August 2006 (UTC)


 * To be fair, you did strive for maximum ambiguity. Clarity:


 * Wikia - the company
 * wikia.com - the host
 * wikia - a Wikia wiki
 * wikia - plural wikia (use 'Wikia wikis' if you need clarity)
 * --Splarka (talk) 21:12, 15 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Strive for maximum ambiguity? Hardly. Rather my lack of skill in expressing myself clearly. However, I think you miss my point, which is that the word "wikia" is used in at least three different ways and that will be confusing to many. Michael 05:17, 16 August 2006 (UTC)


 * The only ambiguity is in wikia being its own plural. If it is the company, use "Wikia" or "Wikia-inc" (upper case, proper noun) and if it is the host use "wikia.com". --Splarka (talk) 01:47, 17 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Michael is right. It's also very annoying when translating to other languages. I say we change the plural form to wikias. Sure, it's not the propper Latin form, but last time I checked, Latin was still a dead language. Yeh, you still have those crazy clerics, but I don't think the church will mind.--Rataube 16:39, 16 August 2006 (UTC)


 * So that would be: "I participate in a wikia that is one of many wikias on Wikia." Still sounds strange to my ear... Michael 17:52, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Here's a suggestion. Change pages such as "Featured Wikia" to "Featured on Wikia." That will make the Main Page consistent. I tried to do this, but was reverted immediately. People seem to be reluctant to discuss this, so I will leave it with this suggestion. Michael 15:10, 23 August 2006 (UTC)


 * It doesn't sound strange to me now, any more than it would sound strange to have a company selling bonsai called "Bonsai". And as we get better known, I think it will start to sound normal to other ears too.  The context generally tells you what the sentence means, although one with all three meanings will always sound a bit odd ("I went to Bonsai to buy a bonsai from their collection of bonsai") -- sannse (talk) 16:26, 31 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Wikia seems good even for plural. Translations would be strange; Swedish: "Wikiaer"/"Wikior", Italian: "Wikiai", French: "Wikiaux"/"Wikias", German: "Wikianen" etc. When it should be obvious, I think i.e. "Wikia wikis" should be used, or just wikis. Smiddle 21:03, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Keep it Simple
Having one word Wikia for all three meanings is actually good. It makes things simple, and by the very fact that it's so unusual, it gets attention, and at the same time makes it easier for people to memorize the fact that the name goes for all three uses. --Yunzhong Hou 20:08, 4 January 2007 (UTC)


 * On the contrary, by being irregular and unusual it creates confusion. When learning words in any language the easiest to remember are always the regulars not the exceptions. One word - three meanings, that creats ambiguety, the opposite of simplicity. Once you alredy know it you'll remeber it easyly I agree, but it'll continue being confusing for newcomers.--Rataube 21:31, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Reviving this discussion from a year ago
At the top of this page, Angela requested back in August 2006, "Please add new thoughts on whether "Wikia" being the plural of "Wikia" is too much of a problem." There was a discussion and consensus of sorts, and DanTMan has offered this description of how people use the word "wikia" around here:

* Wikia - The company hosting wiki. * Wikia wiki or wikia - Individual or multiple wiki hosted by Wikia. * wiki - The type of content being hosted by Wikia.

Here's my topic sentence, which I'm going to try to support below: this was a terrible decision, you will never get people outside Wikia.com to hear the word "wikia" as both singular and plural, and it may cause you to lose control of your branding...see Genericized trademark. John Boddie is an experienced lawyer (and full disclosure...also my spouse :), and he agrees. But I hope I can get consensus without requiring law degrees.

At first glance, the solution above seems reasonable, based on some constraints that Angela mentioned above: "We don't own wikias.com, so using 'Wikias' as a plural might lead to people using the wrong URL", and "Wikis on Wikia are called Wikia. I think this will start to make more sense in future when Wikia starts to offer more than a simple wiki, and the distinction between the two is more obvious. It also distinguishes between simply any wiki on a topic and the ones that are here." Another unspoken constraint is that it's very hard to keep people from shortening things, and "Wikia wikis" might get shortened out there on the web to "wikias"...if they're going to do it anyway, it made some sense to try to "own" and "redirect" that to "wikia"...again, since you don't own the url wikias.com.

Have you watched "Millionaire" (US and UK), where a contestant suggests an answer and then says "I'd like to ask the audience"? Bad idea...the audience will tell you what they think you want to hear, and that's what happened here. If you instead ask people, "What's the plural of wikia?", without telling them the answer ahead of time, they will always say "wikias". And that's your branding problem...if you claim that an individual wiki here is a "wikia", and if Wikia.com takes off in the way that you want it to, then there will be an infinite number of people claiming that they have "wikias" too...especially since you intentionally use a license which encourages people to copy your material. If you follow that Wikipedia link above, you'll find that all the lawyers and money in the world won't help if you have chosen a word for your product that other people just naturally tend to copy...and obviously, this isn't something you'd want to fight anyway.

My proposed solution is that you reclaim the word "Wikia" as a proper noun, in a hurry...as in, "Wikia Inc. is a company, and Wikia.com is a site, that hosts wikis...very special wikis, Wikia wikis, with features available nowhere else." At least, make the claim.

I see tons of evidence that the reversion to "wiki" and "wikis" has already happened, unofficially. In Wikipedia:Wikia, "External Links", David Cannon in 2004 described the contents of Wikia as "wikis" not "wikia", and in all the edits since then, no one corrected him. This is persuasive to me, because I've had a chance to participate in MOS discussions on WP, and those folks _really_ have a good ear for the language, for what people will and won't accept. (In fact, we might want to pull some of them into this discussion, if needed.) I generally hear people in the #wikia channel talking about wikis, and I've asked several times...the general answer is that people say "3 wikis in Wikia" in preference to "3 wikia" or "3 wikias".

The word Wikipedia, like the word Harvard, has no plural, because there's only one. (DanTMan objected that there are "Wikipedias" in many languages, but there's only one organization...not several companies competing to be alternate "Wikipedias".) If you don't tell people how to think about the issue ahead of time...and out there on the web, your message will not get through...people will choose words and meanings based on whatever seem to be the obvious analogies. Wikia has the same ending as Wikipedia, and it sounds very much like the word was intended to be analogous to Wikipedia, so analogy would suggest that saying "wikia in Wikia" is like saying "wikipedia in Wikipedia" or "harvard in Harvard" and expecting the first word to sound like a plural...it doesn't. In fact, I can't think of any proper nouns at all with the same form in the singular and plural. When wikia was suggested as the plural of wikia (small w), it may be that people thought "That sounds right..."data" and "media" are both singular and plural, after all." That's a false analogy, because no manual of style will accept using "data", "media", etc. as singular and plural in the same context...you're supposed to pick one and go with it. (And of course the words were plural only, originally.)

DanTMan said: "But honestly, this is quite a minor issue in comparison to everything going on in the Wikia community", and I agree....now. But if Wikia.com becomes everything you want it to be, there's no bigger marketing mistake than choosing a word for your product that you can't control. &mdash; Dan Dank55 20:59, 18 December 2007 (UTC)


 * You missed one of my extremely important points. You can't compare Wikia and Wikipedia like that. There is no Wikipedia organization, there is only the Wikimedia organization. You can't compare Wikipedia to Wikia because they are not of the same type of thing. "wikia in Wikia" is not like saying "wikipedia in Wikipedia", it's equivalent to saying "wikipedia in Wikimedia" which is valid. And again, the content of Wikia is wiki, that's the type of content hosted, branded by the term wikia. Companies loose branding when there banding name is used in commonplace to refer to things which they do not provide. There is no issue with Wikia wiki being referred to as wiki because they still are wiki even though we brand them as wikia. Branding would be lost if "wikia" was used to refer to non Wikia hosted wiki. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) (tricks) (current topic) Dec 18, 2007 @ 21:43 (UTC)


 * DanTMan, with respect, I think you're missing something. My post makes two arguments: an argument that a lawyer would like, and an argument that MOS-discussion people like, about the way English is used, and what you can predict about future English usage from analogy.  When I said to compare Wikimedia and Wikia, I was making the second type of argument, you're making the first.  If you disagree about "what people are likely to say in the future, based on analogy", we can settle that in a hurry...the Wikipedia MOS people are absolutely brilliant about that kind of thing, we can invite them in.  Your second point is a legal point, and really requires a legal answer...if there's some confusion, I'll be happy to get some knowledgeable lawyer to weigh in here, I've worked in law offices most of my life (but I'm not a lawyer).  You say, "Branding would be lost if "wikia" was used to refer to non Wikia hosted wiki," and that's my point too.  It's also my point that, unless you have a large stable of pro-bono lawyers ready to file lawsuits to defend the trademark, you're in trouble if you call the wikis "wikia", and if Wikia.com really takes off, because then non-Wikia-Inc people will call their stuff "wikias" too, especially since Wikia makes it easy for people to copy their stuff. &mdash; Dan Dank55 21:51, 18 December 2007 (UTC)