Here's what I'm thinking:
Western RPG developers and Japanese RPG developers are unusual in that they share very few ideas with each other. Most other genres have merged geographically these days, to the point that Japanese games will freely borrow elements from Western games and vice versa.
The terms wRPG and jRPG just exist to represent this, the two different traditions which have remarkably little to do with each other. Most of the time you can just say one tradition exists in the West and one in Japan, and where a game is made gives you a good basic idea of what kind of game it is, but there are exceptions.
Most of the time you can also classify games according to which tradition they draw from -- one of the weird things is how often games only draw from either wRPG or jRPG conventions, and have nothing to do with the other. Just like the geographical lines however, there are exceptions.
Both ways to classify are just shorthand ways of describing games that are strangely different from each other, for the most part. There's no exact definition of jRPG or wRPG -- they're just labels to get you thinking on the right track. Even though those labels mean different things to different people, there is so much diversity in the history of RPG video games (and computer games) that not having the labels to get you started might be even worse.
