Wikipedia is clearly the core global brand.
It also has a prominence in the history of the Web and internetworked
society that Wikidata, whatever its future success, will never match.
Internally, as all have noted, the dilemma is that it is associated with
the focus and policies of one project. So if we shift towards calling
things "Wikipedia Foo" instead of "Wikimedia Foo", we will have to go
out
of our way to expand its connotations. That takes an internal campaign: w
thoughtful & responsive answers to common questions /concerns.
SJ
P.S. Personally, while these recs encourage keeping the old project names,
I think Wikipictionary, Wikipews, Wikipedanta and Wikiperversity have a
chance of becoming even more popular with new readers & contributors.
--
On Fri., Apr. 12, 2019, 11:33 p.m. Andrew Lih, <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Responses below:
On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 5:07 PM Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I would argue that, on the contrary, for the outside word we were less
Wikipedia 10 years ago. Around that time there was still hope that
Wikibooks or Wikinews could still be successful, at least in some
languages. New language versions of other projects than Wikipedia were
created relatively regularly and many people who started with
Wikipedia moved on to maintain and develop other projects. Today the
Foundation has all but given up on all other projects except the 3 you
mention below (and, to some extent, Wikisource), Google is taking data
from Wikipedia (but prefers other dictionaries instead of Wikt) and
people barely hide a polite yawn when you talk about the other
projects.
For the record, I was one of the earliest skeptics of Wikinews and was one
of the first accredited Wikinewsies in 2005. I believed the best way to
critically understand its flaws was to actually immerse myself in it. I
quickly saw it was not viable, and memorialized my thoughts about it for
Harvard Nieman Lab (below). I say this not to brag, but simply to say that
the "hope" of that era may be overhyped. :)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/why-wikipedia-beats-wikinews-as-a-collabo…
- We
stand on three legs (and more): If there was ever a time that
Wikimedia was more than Wikipedia, it is now. The trio of Wikipedia,
Commons and Wikidata is the bedrock of open knowledge sharing in a way
that
was not true even 3 years ago.
While that is true, the monolingual nature of the last 2 has left all
but the most determined outside this revolution. While not directly
relevant for the branding issue, it partially explains why people know
about Wikipedia more: it's in their language!
Wait, I'm confused. Are you saying Wikidata is a "monolingual" project? As
a semantic database, it's perhaps the most multilingual-friendly project we
have. I've collaborated with Portuguese and French GLAM projects on
Wikidata because of how good it is at providing an interface for a shared
data set using the user's native tongue. So I'm eager to hear more about
why you believe Wikidata is in the "monolingual" bin.
Specialization has clear advantages, but again,
is not helping with
branding towards the general public and that is our target, not GLAM
or photographers.
This is a valid critique, though I'm not sure we've ever put the full force
of Foundation resources behind providing public awareness for Commons. It's
mostly been through community-level efforts and SiteNotice banners, to my
knowledge, for WLM, Commons POTY, Wiki Loves Africa, etc.
Not sure what the point is here. System biases are also obvious in
Commons (copyright law) and Wikidata (very
specific knowledge is
required to understand how data is organized).
I think the point is: add the systemic bias of needing to know how to read
to the stack of the biases you also list here. There are a multitude of
challenges, and I think you absolutely win with "understanding copyright"
as the biggest user challenge we have. :)
This war is specific to English Wikipedia and a
few other wikis
(admittedly, rather larger ones). Smaller communities have already
largely embraced Wikidata in infoboxes and elsewhere. This has not
changed how they represent themselves and I believe that the same
holds true for the renaming.
Oh yes, there are many folks highly envious of Basque and Catalan Wikipedia
where Wikidata integration is used effectively on a large scale.
Also, I believe it is mistaken to think of the
branding proposal as a
single, monolithic, yes-or-no proposal. It is rather a series of
proposals, some easier and some more complicated to implement. Each
should be analyzed independently for its own merits.
Agree. We won't know until/if it happens. I simply wanted to make sure a
broad set of concerns were being incorporated into the risk assessment.
Thanks
-Andrew
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>