'W ikipedia": Anyone looking for information online in the last few years is bound to have come across this funny word. Type any search term into Google, and a Wikipedia entry will probably pop up somewhere on the first page or two. On "Japan," for example, the Wikipedia entry comes in an impressive eighth. On "bird flu," it ranks 16th, right after a bunch of government health sites, the BBC, the New York Times and CNN.
But how much can you trust what this oddly named entity tells you about Japan or anything else? First, a bit of background. Like us, you probably wondered initially what in the world Wikipedia was. The "pedia" part was obvious, especially since the Web site itself proclaims it "the free encyclopedia." But what about "Wiki"?
Travelers familiar with Honolulu may have been reminded of the famed Wiki Wiki buses that shuttle passengers around the sprawling international airport there. And they would have been right. It turns out that Wikipedia's name ultimately derives from those buses, which are themselves named for the Hawaiian word for "quick" or "to hasten." We say ultimately because use of the word to describe a type of Web site that allows people to contribute and edit content -- as Wikipedia does -- actually dates back to 1995, six years before Wikipedia was born.