'Reclaiming Wicca' is a concept that gained considerable ground among the American members of British Traditional Witchcraft shortly after the year 2000. Essentially speaking, 'Wicca' was originally the name of the religious revival which was started by Gerald Brousseau Gardner in England in 1951 after the repeal of Britain's last Anti-Witchcraft laws. To the British Trad Witches (or BTWs), therefore, the label of 'Wicca' applies only to those witches who practice the revival of witchcraft that Gardner and Doreen Valiente codified in the original Book of Shadows. In other words, Wiccans, to the BTW viewpoint, had to be members of one of the initiatory mystery traditions working with the oathbound god names and religious rituals as passed on by Gardner to his lineage through apostolic succession.
In the late 1980's, the eclectic pagan community in the United States began to associate Wicca with the loose connotation of 'white witchcraft'. As such, many of the pagans who felt they were called to a more liberal interpretation or revival of witchcraft began to assume the use of the label 'Wicca', until the word achieved a common usage synonymous with witchcraft or neopagandom in general.
With the rise in popular use of the internet in the 1990's, communication was facilitated between members of various BTW traditions and covens, and a grassroots BTW movement was born to try and reclaim the proper use of the label of Wicca. This has been met with minor controversy as several of the non-BTW witches often seem to equate the BT Witches' attempts to reclaim the word with an attempt to somehow invalidate their claims to be 'real' witches. The BTW position is that they do not care whether someone is a 'real' witch or not, they just want the neopagan community to recognize the origins and proper use of the term 'Wicca' or 'wiccan' as a label to designate the followers of a specific religion with specific beliefs and practices.
The debate also gives rise to an ironic situation, since the so-called Reclaiming Wicca Tradition started by Starhawk and Diane Baker is, by the BTW's definitions, not a tradition of the Wiccan faith and therefore, under their argument, not entitled to a legitimate claim to the term 'wiccan'. Non-initiatory witches have accused the British Traditional Witches of using this as yet another elitist maneuver. The British Traditionalists claim they merely want the proper use of their religion's name back.