CLAMP vs. Clamp — The Wikipedia War

I’m sure most of us know of Wikipedia — the online encyclopedia where nearly anyone can create entries and make updates to articles that reside within its pages. I’ve used it quite a lot and have made entries and fixes to certain articles. But if you’ve used it a lot, you’ll notice that things can change from time to time and for unknown reasons. In the Chobits page, try to talk about “Sumomo” and watch how quickly that gets removed because a “god of Wikipedia” has deemed that only the name “Plum” is allowed (For those who don’t know, Sumomo is the name of a small female android in the manga and anime. The word “sumomo” means “plum” in Japan, so TokyoPop decided to translate the name Sumomo to Plum in the official manga translation. Although the official anime English adaptation uses “Sumomo,” one of the Wikipedia gods has decided that only the TokyoPop name is allowed to be used in the Chobits article and the explanation about Sumomo/Plum has to be relegated to near the bottom of the article. All attempts to use “Sumomo” are rejected out of hand as are attempts to explain the name differential early in the article.).

Things like this may be annoying, but I was amazed when I heard of the war going on within Wikipedia over CLAMP. Believe it or not, some of the gods of Wikipedia have decided that “CLAMP” cannot be used on Wikipedia’s pages and so have mass-converted “CLAMP” to “Clamp.”

Wikipedia has various guidelines to have standards on posting. One such standard, called the Manual of Style (trademarks) (WP:MOS-TM), defines what can and can’t be used on the site. Allow me to quote a bit:

Follow standard English text formatting and capitalization rules even if the trademark owner encourages special treatment:

• avoid:REALTOR
• instead, use: Realtor
• but, don’t invent new formats: MCI is standard English, while “Mci” is essentially never used.

Apparently, the gods of Wikipedia have decides that CLAMP is a trademark rather than a pseudonym of a group and so “CLAMP” cannot be used. The gods have deemed that “CLAMP” is a trademark even if it isn’t an officially labeled trademark and so the name has to be “Clamp” within Wikipedia.

While the third bullet point would appear to apply, the gods have decided to use any erroneous printing of “Clamp” on any official website (like Amazon.com or Amazon Japan) to be official justification of their decision. Apparently, the New York Times also used “Clamp” once (which is also in error) and that’s like icing on the cake. A large number of people have argued with the gods of Wikipedia citing all sorts of things (including all these official images on Wikipedia where “CLAMP” is clearly shown and not “Clamp). The gods will not be persuade.

“You plebes can get stuffed. We have officially renamed ‘CLAMP’ to ‘Clamp’ because that’s the English way it should be. We are not Japan and thus we will not use ‘CLAMP.’ ”

And so the little war at Wikipedia goes on. It will be nice if we could get this back to “CLAMP” which is the accurate name of the group rather than create a new name for them. However, I suspect that the gods of Wikipedia will never allow things to go back to the way they were no matter what. For some reason, these gods remind me of those who rather than use an Indian’s real name would instead force a translated name upon them because that’s the English way of doing things.

Additional: See this article for what we fans should do about this.