On 5/9/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote: One former Wikiquote sysop posted a bunch of dumb copies of policies and guidelines from English Wikipedia and labelled them "official policy of project" even not trying to replace the word "Wikipedia" with "Wikiquote". I forgot it when i wrote my latest reply. So perhaps it is not only you to think it a good idea, Erik.
On 09/05/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
* As for service project or not
Apparently not to you, but to everyone else...
As for identity, I would like to point on Wikipedia we have spent many times so-and-so Wikipedia policy wasn't applied here because they were separate projects. I am not sure if this idea is widely shared.
Yes and no. Tribalism can be enormously harmful. The mess we tried to clean up with the licensing policy is an example of that; there has been non-free creep in a number of projects & languages due to a desire to do things "differently." And, to some extent, the response to that policy has been very aggressive and hostile. "Who are these people to make policy for our project? We're not Wikimedia, we're Wiki-xy." Of course, only a tiny minority of users feel that way. But it's exactly that kind of attitude that a broader communal identity might counteract. It would be meaningful to say "We are all Wikipedians. We share these values." Wikimedia, on the other hand, is a detached concept, which seems to be related by many to notions of bureaucracy and management, rather than genuine community.
Well if you propose to rename everything "Wikimedia _", I would probably agree with that. Strengthening the Wikimedia brand == good. Replacing it with the Wikipedia brand, er...
I agree Wikimedia XXX might make a sense semantically, but for recognition I am sceptical in a global context as I wrote before.
"Wikimedia Commons" is already confusable with CC, shortened as "Commons" ... at least from google result in Japanese, this tendency doesn't help to increase recognition. Most of the top ten results on Google in Japanese are related to CC or Lessig's _Commons_, and no result for Wikimedia Commons.
Other "Wikimedia + (common name)" may reach the similar end, I suspect. While it could be helpful to increase the recognition on "Wikimedia" brandname, I am not sure how it helps each projects to be recognized.