I was concerned about this - its interesting to see it reported. From now on a certain percentage of conservatives in the US will permanently associate wikis with liberal commies who are trying to destroy America and will not have anything to do with them or anyone who does. This is an unfortunate consequence for four reasons:

1. It removes certain voices from the collective dialog that open wikis consist of.

2. It makes those minds even more susceptible to propaganda because they will not use objective information if it comes from wikis - particularly if it challenges their presumptions. "An iceberg the size of Manhattan?! Right. Where'd you look that up? On a wiki? Har Har"

3. It means that wikis will be avoided as a knowledge management tool even in closed contexts by these people. Imagine suggesting the use of a wiki right now for information sharing in an southern workplace dominated by fox news fans who are semi computer literate.

4. It means that some future story involving wikis - no matter how benign - will be taken as negative by a certain percentage of listeners, for no good reason.

All these costs would be acceptable if Wikileaks was a wiki - but its not...

Wikileaks isn’t one of Wales’s websites but the “wiki” part of the name confuses people. Wales told me yesterday: “It’s not a wiki and their ethos is very different from mine but that’s not a criticism necessarily.”

Wikileaks, as Wales points out, is not a wiki at all (though it is built partially on MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia) but the site, which made headlines with its recent leak of documents on the war in Afghanistan, is assumed by many to be linked to Wales in some way.

I had always assumed that wikileaks was a wiki. I've never been interested enough in the site to actually look. Frankly, I'm a bit annoyed at them for picking this name now that I know that they aren't really operating a wiki. Its obviously an attempt to capitalize on the noteriety of wikipedia and to wrap the site in the mystique of crowdsourced web content - when in fact the thing is moderated and mediawiki is merely being used as a content management system.