[Brand Project] Next naming phase - Wikisource-l

Bodhisattwa Mandal

19 Jun 19 Jun

6:17 a.m.

Hi Nicolas, I don't think our voices really matter in this case. Check the RfC, people are still voting against 'Wikipedia' as a brand name, but the survey has only one option which is three variants of Wikipedia. It doesn't even have the option of status quo. This is very frustrating to say, but this is the truth that we cannot change anything through this survey or participating in the process, as the outcome is already decided. The process is just an eye-wash to show that the community was consulted. Personally I feel, this whole process is completely biased, pre-decided and non-transparent. There is no point wasting time here. Regards, Bodhisattwa On Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 16:10 Nicolas VIGNERON <vigneron.nicolas(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Hi y'all, In case you didn't see it already, here is a reminder that the Naming Convention Proposals Presentation will start in ~4 hours at 15:00 UTC <https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Brand+Naming+Presentation&iso=20200616T15&p1=1440&ah=1> on YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3zlBGHHHiY Something that you may not know, is that the Wikisource Community User Group has a voice in this process. More exactly here is a copy-paste of a mail I received yesterday from Samir Elsharbaty (Community Brand and Marketing coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation): *Feedback period: For affiliates and individuals from 16 June to 30 June 2020. A collective feedback survey link will be shared with your email addresses next week. This survey is a primary way for affiliates to submit feedback as a group on the proposals. If you would like to change the email address we send the survey to, please let us know. Affiliate Liaisons: The most straightforward way for your affiliate to provide feedback during this phase and the upcoming ones is by designating an affiliate liaison to be a connection point between our team and your affiliate. If you are interested in designating a liaison to receive updates and facilitate discussions, please reply to this email.* I proposed my name to be the liaison for the Wikisource Community UG, if anyone else is interested, they can join or even replace me. And if you have any comments or remarks about the propositions, please share them (before end of June) so I can then share them in the survey. Cheers, Nicolas _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

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Jayanta Nath

10:03 a.m.

Hi, I am totally agreed with Bodhisattwa's point of view. I supporting to Nicolas as a liaison person from the Wikisource Community UG. Regards, Jayanta On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 1:28 PM Nicolas VIGNERON <vigneron.nicolas(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Hi, Sadly, I tend to agree with you Bodhisattwa! The proposals are disheartening... That said, I don't think this is completely pointless tho. The RfC (I'm guessing you talk about https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Should_the_Foundation_… ) has been mostly unheard by the Foundation, that's is why - I think - this is important to say it again on the official survey. That's why I think our voices matter here. If you didn't or don't have time to watch the whole video on Youtube, here is the summary page of the 3 proposals : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_moveme… (with subpages for each proposal), which I can resume with the examples of the renaming of the Wikimedia movement : - option 1: Wikipedia Network - option 2: Wikipedia Movement - option 3: Wiki All three options remove the term "Wikimedia" to replace it by "Wikipedia" and indeed, there is no statu quo option... But we can still reject all options (either say they're all "very bad" or rank them from "bad" to "very bad", for me 1 and 3 are "very bad" and 2 is only "bad"). In any case, Wikisource and the Wikisource Community User Group will not be rename and are not directly concerned by the current renaming. Still, I think that the name "Wikipedia" overtaking the whole movement is a bad symbol and an invisibilization of other Wikimedia projects. The survey is long (and all questions mandatory) but I encourage you to still fill it personally and to help me to find the answer for the affiliate filling. Before answering it, you can see the question on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_moveme… to have an overview. Should we create a page on meta to collect our point of view and prepare the global answer? or do you prefer to talk by mails? (you can send me a private mail if you don't want to speak on this public list, I'm also available on various social medias, feel free to get in touch with me). Cheers, ~nicolas Le ven. 19 juin 2020 à 06:17, Bodhisattwa Mandal < bodhisattwa.rgkmc(a)gmail.com> a écrit :

Hi Nicolas, I don't think our voices really matter in this case. Check the RfC, people are still voting against 'Wikipedia' as a brand name, but the survey has only one option which is three variants of Wikipedia. It doesn't even have the option of status quo. This is very frustrating to say, but this is the truth that we cannot change anything through this survey or participating in the process, as the outcome is already decided. The process is just an eye-wash to show that the community was consulted. Personally I feel, this whole process is completely biased, pre-decided and non-transparent. There is no point wasting time here. Regards, Bodhisattwa On Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 16:10 Nicolas VIGNERON <vigneron.nicolas(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi y'all, In case you didn't see it already, here is a reminder that the Naming Convention Proposals Presentation will start in ~4 hours at 15:00 UTC <https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Brand+Naming+Presentation&iso=20200616T15&p1=1440&ah=1> on YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3zlBGHHHiY Something that you may not know, is that the Wikisource Community User Group has a voice in this process. More exactly here is a copy-paste of a mail I received yesterday from Samir Elsharbaty (Community Brand and Marketing coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation): *Feedback period: For affiliates and individuals from 16 June to 30 June 2020. A collective feedback survey link will be shared with your email addresses next week. This survey is a primary way for affiliates to submit feedback as a group on the proposals. If you would like to change the email address we send the survey to, please let us know. Affiliate Liaisons: The most straightforward way for your affiliate to provide feedback during this phase and the upcoming ones is by designating an affiliate liaison to be a connection point between our team and your affiliate. If you are interested in designating a liaison to receive updates and facilitate discussions, please reply to this email.* I proposed my name to be the liaison for the Wikisource Community UG, if anyone else is interested, they can join or even replace me. And if you have any comments or remarks about the propositions, please share them (before end of June) so I can then share them in the survey. Cheers, Nicolas _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

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J Hayes

1:41 p.m.

as Asaf said - they heard the concerns and proceeded anyway. further engagement is a waste of emotional energy. we should think about branding of wikisource & transcription as a part of global transcription efforts. It is a loose network, but we could be outreaching and organizing more. cheers. On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 4:37 AM Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Nicolas VIGNERON, 19/06/20 10:58:

Still, I think that the name "Wikipedia" overtaking the whole movement is a bad symbol and an invisibilization of other Wikimedia projects.

Yes, so Wikisource users (and all other Wikimedia projects too) should make their specific concerns heard. It wouldn't be the first time that the WMF board has let the WMF staff spend years and millions on some controversial pet project only to reverse it at the very last minute because of universal opposition. It's tiring that WMF never learns, but we know that promoting free knowledge is a constant struggle. I'm not sure at the moment whether participating in the closed-source survey does any good, given it's subject to manipulation (aka political spin), but it doesn't preclude other initiatives. Federico _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

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Gerard Meijssen

8:47 a.m.

Hoi, At the time there were enough people who did not want a Wikipedia Foundation so it did not happen. People insisted for the Wikimedia Foundation to concentrate on Wikipedia and English Wikipedia at that and that is what happened. In a marketing driven organisation, there would be people specifically tasked with understanding, developing, optimising the other brands. It was the German chapter that developed and still develops Wikidata. Key parts are left to the Wikimedia Foundation; they are integration of Commons, hardware and performance search and marketing... The assertion that all the other projects are there to support Wikipedia is not easy to explain. What is abundantly clear is that the existing bias for the support of English means that the market for English is largely saturated. We are at a point where Wikidata is at a point where it overtakes English Wikipedia in supporting the other projects. * Commons is now searchable *in any language* thanks to Special:MediaSearch [1]. It just takes further development and marketing to make Commons bigger than many of the commercial alternatives because of this. * Scholia needs internationalisation and localisation. Having said that, it already points to later papers for what you find in the reference section of many/most articles. It follows that what was a NPOV at a time is no longer neutral. Increasingly Scholia templates find their way on English Wikipedia articles.That is how it "serves" Wikipedia * Scholia is increasingly used by scientists in their professional capacity. The demand for Wikidata increases autonomously as a result. * Given that Wikidata knows about Wikisource, it could know about the status of Wikisource books et al. This provides a basis to market the finished product to an audience that would exponentially grow. * This is not exhaustive The point is that Wikimedia Foundation needs to market to realise its goal; share in the sum of all knowledge. That is what it is there for and has written a 2030 strategy for. It should not be beholden to Wikipedia or anyone. Thanks, GerardM [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch?type=bitmap&q=%D… On Sun, 21 Jun 2020 at 00:14, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:

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On 2020-06-19 09:58, Nicolas VIGNERON wrote:

All three options remove the term "Wikimedia" to replace it by "Wikipedia" and indeed, there is no statu quo option...

In my opinion, it was a mistake in 2003, when the foundation was established, to invent a new name for it. If it had been called "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start, it would have been so much easier to explain to friends, collaboration partners and donors what we are. We are a foundation to support Wikipedia (and also its sister projects). Wikisource, Wiktionary and the rest are just that: They are sister projects to Wikipedia, always were, always have been. Only Wikipedia is the groundbreaking innovation that could win the Nobel Prize (for peace, perhaps?). None of the sister projects could qualify for this. While Wikisource is great, we should be humble and grateful that we can benefit from all the money and technology around Wikipedia, including events like Wikimania. What you have to ask yourself: If it had been named "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start, would you have left it? Would you have left Wikisource, in order to administrate your own, separate, independent project? Asaf Bartov does this with Project Ben-Yehuda. I do this with Project Runeberg. These are not part of Wikisource, not part of the Wikipedia/-media movement. But we never broke away from Wikisource. The reason we maintain our own projects is because they are older than Wikisource. It is a lot of extra work to administrate your own project. If this kind of extra administration is your mission in life, perhaps you should leave Wikisource and run your own? See how fun that is. In my case, I could close down Project Runeberg and merge with Wikisource, if it weren't for some differences in licensing. Much of what I have digitized there can not fit in Wikisource. And so I continue to carry the extra burden of administrating my own project. But it's not because I hate the Wikipedia movement or Wikisource. On the contrary, I was active in establishing the Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2007. And I have spent too much time explaining the difference between Wikipedia and Wikimedia. I wish it had been named "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start. When the burden of dual names was obvious in 2015, I wish the foundation had just renamed itself quickly without asking anyone. It would have been criticized, but now it is criticized anyway after very long and slow process, so no gain. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Linköping, Sweden Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/ _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

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J Hayes

6:34 p.m.

Well, people wonder about what might have beens, when WMF is changing branding to where movement was 10 years ago. WMF is showing its conservative approach meeting readers where they are, rather than shaping brand of where we want to go. And collecting money from large donors. We need some branding for where we want wikisource to go. Can we have some wikisource t-shirts with Indic languages on it? My vienna t-shirt is getting old. Cheers. On Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 7:54 AM Tito Dutta <trulytito(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Greetings and good day,

> What you have to ask yourself: If it had been named "Wikipedia

Foundation"

> from the start, would you have left it?

– That's citing an imaginary situation while dealing with a real problem. Thanks Tito Dutta On Sun, 21 Jun 2020 at 03:44, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:

On 2020-06-19 09:58, Nicolas VIGNERON wrote:

All three options remove the term "Wikimedia" to replace it by "Wikipedia" and indeed, there is no statu quo option...

In my opinion, it was a mistake in 2003, when the foundation was established, to invent a new name for it. If it had been called "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start, it would have been so much easier to explain to friends, collaboration partners and donors what we are. We are a foundation to support Wikipedia (and also its sister projects). Wikisource, Wiktionary and the rest are just that: They are sister projects to Wikipedia, always were, always have been. Only Wikipedia is the groundbreaking innovation that could win the Nobel Prize (for peace, perhaps?). None of the sister projects could qualify for this. While Wikisource is great, we should be humble and grateful that we can benefit from all the money and technology around Wikipedia, including events like Wikimania. What you have to ask yourself: If it had been named "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start, would you have left it? Would you have left Wikisource, in order to administrate your own, separate, independent project? Asaf Bartov does this with Project Ben-Yehuda. I do this with Project Runeberg. These are not part of Wikisource, not part of the Wikipedia/-media movement. But we never broke away from Wikisource. The reason we maintain our own projects is because they are older than Wikisource. It is a lot of extra work to administrate your own project. If this kind of extra administration is your mission in life, perhaps you should leave Wikisource and run your own? See how fun that is. In my case, I could close down Project Runeberg and merge with Wikisource, if it weren't for some differences in licensing. Much of what I have digitized there can not fit in Wikisource. And so I continue to carry the extra burden of administrating my own project. But it's not because I hate the Wikipedia movement or Wikisource. On the contrary, I was active in establishing the Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2007. And I have spent too much time explaining the difference between Wikipedia and Wikimedia. I wish it had been named "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start. When the burden of dual names was obvious in 2015, I wish the foundation had just renamed itself quickly without asking anyone. It would have been criticized, but now it is criticized anyway after very long and slow process, so no gain. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Linköping, Sweden Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/ _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

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Nicolas VIGNERON

11:07 p.m.

Hi y'all! Thanks for this Bodhisattwa! Here is the link to an internal poll to decide if the Wikisource Community User Group should sign the Community open letter on renaming : https://framadate.org/xfWBsL36rdArxpnH The vote is open to anybody with at least 50 edits on Wikisource, please provide your username on Wikisource so we can check this. There are 4 options to vote : - yes (green tick) - no (red cross) - maybe (yellow tick with parenthesis) - abstain/no vote (grey interrogation point) Cheers, For the Wikisource Community User Group, Nicolas Vigneron

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