On 09 May 2007 21:38:00 +0200, Claus Färber GMANE@faerber.muc.de wrote:
Maybe it's better to use the "Wikimedia" brand for that strategy and reserve "Wikipedia" for the "Wikimedia Encyclopedia":
I don't believe so; the Wikipedia brand enjoys the strongest global recognition, so phasing it out would probably be unwise. If we do _not_ phase it out, we continue to suffer from the single largest source of confusion, the Wikipedia/Wikimedia similarity. In fact, we amplify it if we call Wikipedia the "Wikimedia Encyclopedia".
But your main point is very valid. It is extremely difficult to protect a name globally. And the less protection you pursue, the more deception by spammers and scammers will ensue. Besides those, we have had a few disputes with truly insane detractors. Given the generic nature of the "wiki" prefix, there will also be an ever-increasing overlap with legitimate ventures. Even Google could not properly protect "GMail"; it still resolves to "Google Mail" in the UK and Germany.
We're not in the position of a cereal company that, step by step, sets up operations in different countries. Everything we do is global and multilingual from day 1. Our exploding complexity of brands and domain names across languages & countries poses a huge management problem for an organization of our size.
Even for an artificial name like "Wikimedia", people write it in different scripts; the interwiki links for our article about WMF indicate that this is the case in Arabic, Dhivehi, Persian, Gujarati, Hindi, Hebrew, Macedonian, Russian, Sinhalese, Serbian, Tamil, Thai, Yiddish, and Chinese. For the names that are based on real words like "news" or "-pedia", the number of variants is much larger still, and you get names like "Viquinotícies", "Wikinotizie", "Wikiştiri", all referring to the same project.
As internationalized domain names take off, things will only get worse.
People may complain that giving the Wikipedia brand primacy is horribly unfair. But it is already part of WMF's trademark strategy, which is organized in tiers where we pursue the highest level of protection for brands of high significance. That's the only way to avoid wasting huge amounts of resources on trademark registrations and domain name negotiations, all of which can be quite expensive.
In my opinion, it is much more honest to give a project a spin-off name like "Wikipedia News" _unless_ you are also willing to afford the same level of protection to its name _and_ its officially recognized variants that you give to Wikipedia. And, simply put, we cannot afford to do so at present for all our names.
You may argue that smaller projects do not need the same level of protection, as abusers are less likely to be interested in them. Unfortunately, parasites do tend to plan ahead. Any new brand we announce widely will generate international interest. If we don't immediately pursue wide protection, we will have to wrestle control from illegitimate owners later.
Given its size, Wikimedia has actually done a remarkable job at protecting its interests, and the chapters and local project communities have often helped or led this process. Still, I fear that the challenge is Sisyphean in nature. One reason to simplify brands is quite simple and IMHO appealing: We can free a lot of energy that is currently diverted by whack-a-mole games.
Many people are uncomfortable with the notion of giving the Wikipedia brand primacy. Interestingly, however, the practical challenge you raise (which I also pointed out in my original proposal) has hardly been discussed at all, as have other disadvantages of the current brand setup. Names do not, however, exist in a vacuum!
One way to address the community concerns is to define criteria (clear milestones, annual review, etc.) for a project to receive its own name. Much like we qualified some projects as "beta", having them officially associated with Wikipedia would recognize that their reality doesn't yet reflect our ambitions. Having such a process could also be a major incentive for a community to reach certain goals.
Arguably, if we do recognize at least the _potential_ for projects to obtain independent brands, the organization should not be called "Wikipedia Foundation" -- perhaps it needs a different name entirely.
One thing is clear: rebranding is _always_ controversial, in any company or organization. People become attached to names. But when we have a mess like the one we are currently dealing with, it may be necessary to make some people unhappy in order to achieve clarity, consistency and -- importantly -- basic manageability.