Most of us are familiar with the famous exchange from Through the Looking Glass:

"You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir," said Alice. "Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called "Jabberwocky"?" 

Lewis Carroll's heroine then goes on to recite the first verse, beginning 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves...and Humpty Dumpty accordingly obliges with all manner of succinct exegesis, no matter how far-fetched Alice's terminology may initially sound.

I am reminded of this by this week's remarkable deletion, from Wikipedia, of the useful colloquy "Enterprise 2.0."

In the interests of full disclosure I should state at this point that one of the principal proponents and undisputed domain expert in the fast-emerging "Enterprise 2.0" field, Dion Hinchcliffe, is a close friend, colleague and associate, since he is Technical Chair of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo (which I chair) and Editor-in-Chief of AJAXWorld Magazine and Web 2.0 Journal, both of which I helped just this year to create.

But one needn't be an admirer of Dion to grok the importance of a succinct term for the emerging vision of what otherwise needs glossing as "freeform, collaborative software that adapts to the situation and is controlled primarily by the user, giving workers tools that get out of their way and connect them to their colleagues and their data" (from Dion's own ZDNet blog).

When someone as eminent as Prof. Andrew McAfee (pictured), who first coined the term in March 2006, is writing articles in the MIT Sloan Management Review entitled "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration", then it is surely an odd time for Wikipedia, of all reference sources, to be suggesting that there's no consensus on the value or meaning of such a term. McAfee is an associate professor with the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School, so he is no lightweight. His HBS faculty blog gave an early account of the nixing on Thursday.

I am reminded, again, of Through the Looking Glass:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."