On 5/9/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Some of our projects (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Commons, Wikiquote) naturally lend themselves to a kind of "shallow" entry where number of hits is a more or less accurate metric for success - people come to these projects looking for bite-sized pieces (one page) of information.
Wikipedia, one page of information? Many topics start with very detailed overview articles and allow you to explore in depth, and the creative uses around Wikipedia that we know about certainly encompass everything you list for Wikibooks+. You can definitely consult WP in similar manners as you would a textbook. Yes, the average engagement with the resource may be shorter. But I think traffic is still a reasonable measure of that, as short lookups are unlikely to lead to lots of subsequent hits. And, let's not kid ourselves as to the size of the gap in recognition & use.
Anyway, your general comparisons with Google are not wholly convincing, because Google Mail is built by paid Google employees who don't need to be personally invested in the identity and importance of the project they're working on.
To be fair, the largest community that Google operates is not strongly Google-branded: Orkut. But there's another big difference, in that Wikipedia _does_ stand for a community of values & the non-profit that operates it, not just for some faceless corporate entity.
The strongest argument against the rebranding I see is that people do not want to be seen as mere service providers to Wikipedia. I can argue against that perception, of course (which I think is certainly logically flawed), but if that is the majority feeling, and unlikely to change, then it may be pointless to debate the issue any further (and be useful to limit the discussion, perhaps, to the Wikimedia/Wikipedia confusion). So, the best next step will probably be to summarize the arguments that have been made here, and to poll for some numbers.