Hi Xavier and all,
You say, "even the WMF tried to rebrand itself from «Wikimedia Foundation» to «Wikipedia Foundation» in a move that I consider a disbelief towards its own content legacies"
It seems these rebranding efforts are in fact ongoing after all. According to Meta,[1] the fundraising emails sent to donors over the past few months have had Jimmy Wales signing off as follows:
Thanks,
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Foundation
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fundraising&diff=next&o...
Email text linked in that edit: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OAjBvUJh3cwuYDzpXRusX7HqOOJIwtTfLXgTMRsb... Archive link: https://archive.fo/J30ls
On Sat, Jan 8, 2022 at 12:37 AM F. Xavier Dengra i Grau via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi/Bona nit
Specifically regarding the last emails about videos and new formats in university students and their use of Wikipedia. A truth is that we already had the chance to integrate better multimedia contents and formats via some channels that he already had: our sister projects.
Wikiversity, Wikibooks or Wikisource were in the past powerful and attractive tools, valid to integrate knowledge in more flexible (non-enciclopedic) forms until mid- last decade. Until they were abandoned with no further tech investing. I remember having trained and mentorized schools, universities and public institutions in Catalonia on Wikibooks until 2015. It was seen as a really valid alternative by then.
Since then WikiHow, Moodle, StuDocu, Notion or other participative niches have progressed with some multimedia inclusions as better opportunities than the WMF sister projects —even the WMF tried to rebrand itself from «Wikimedia Foundation» to «Wikipedia Foundation» in a move that I consider a disbelief towards its own content legacies. All this, despite many small-sized community efforts and requests to claim for better integration of multimedia features, that imho are the key to get these projects a bit back to new success. I don’t think that these competitors offer amazing features that we could not develop (apart from their cuter and cleaner interfaces?).
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and therefore I find that is normal that has some conceptual limitations in how it shapes and shows the content. You rely in other niches for more specific stuff. However, this may be easily tackled in Wikimedia if sister projects' potential and existing contents would be really valued and connected.
That way, if videos are one of the reasons why there is a loss of readers (I agree that we should be able to see longers trend to unmask possible covid peaks) on Wikipedia, we could still redirect/invite/seduce them to alternatives that are still interactive, Open Access, participative & transparent (i.e. Wikimedia wikis).
Best,
Xavier Dengra