The Problem with Wikipedia

[pne]

xkcd_rss captures the problem with Wikipedia rather well:

Wikipedia can take up hours, because there's just so much, and it's all interlinked, and I find such "info-junk" so fascinating.

Comments

[node-ue.livejournal.com]

There's no official pronunciation, I don't think.

The etymological pronunciation would be something between "vee-key-pedia" and "wee-key-pedia".

My view is that it should be "wik-ah-pedia" or "wik-kih-pedia" because the unstressed medial [i:] (the unaccented occurance in the middle of a word of the "ee" sound in "machine" or "lee") is not natural in English. For ease of pronunciation, in quick speech, even when I used to try to say "wee-kee-pee-dee-a", it tended to turn out with the "kee" clipped and I ended up saying basically "Wicca-pedia", which is how I think the majority of the English-speaking world pronounces it.

[pne.livejournal.com]

My view is that it should be "wik-ah-pedia" or "wik-kih-pedia" because the unstressed medial [i:] (the unaccented occurance in the middle of a word of the "ee" sound in "machine" or "lee") is not natural in English.

I'm not quite sure what sound "kih" is supposed to represent.

However, how would you pronounce "Stickypedia"? For me, final -y in "sticky" and similar words seems to be something like [i] rather than [I] (though whether it's the same phoneme as in "eat" or as in "it", I'm not sure -- the sound seems to be somewhere in between).

I think "posh" RP uses [I] for this sound, but I thought that [i], or something similar, is not uncommon.

So while that might not be [i:] as in "machine" or "lee", I would have expected a "wickypedia" pronunciation to be present as well.

Unless you have the same vowel in both syllables of "sticky"?

[node-ue.livejournal.com]

kih = [I].

I would probably pronounce "stickypedia" with an [I] although I use [i] for the last syllable of "sticky"; this is with a Western American accent.

You're right though, it is definitely variable.

[node-ue.livejournal.com]

What sucks with a word like that is that now all of the pseudo-intellectuals will be telling us that it's properly pronounced "weekeepedia", just like they told us it's wrong to pronounce "karate" with an [i] (which is correct, actually, if you assume that the Okinawan language, rather than Standard Japanese, is the origin of the word, and that the romanisation is just from SJ) or "tsunami" without an initial [t].