Editing Omnipedia was, for me, a gateway into a much wider world: a world of pedantry, nitpickery, teapot tempests, molehill mountains, and vicious olog-hai trolls.

This was seldom noticeable at the surface level, aside from the occasional contradictions in spelling, form, and content that one would expect from an encyclopedia people made up out of whatever happened to be within arm’s reach of their computer. No, to get to the real juicy meat of the Omnipedia, you had to look at discussion pages, where people fought each other WWI-style over anything and everything.

Names and spellings were particular bones of contention, especially when there was a choice of American or British varieties. Being a former history geek, I would have been more apt to side with the British had their beloved spellings and words not been so hilariously quaint (subjectively, of course, but such was the case to the other people squabbling over it).

We’re all used to British spellings and their use of superfluous and supernumary letters, but it was the battles over vocabulary that were truly intense. Should it be called ping-pong or whiff-whaff, for instance? The sillier the words, the more passionate the argument:

“We should call them thumbtacks!”

“The accepted Commonwealth term is fidgy-divots!”

“I’m from Austrailia and we call them swopdobbers or swoppies!”

“In Canada we spell it theumbetacke!”