Prompted by discussions in another thread, I ask a related question--
;1-- A roadmap towards affiliation
How should a currently-unaffiliated project go about becoming 'part of' Wikimedia?
One easy step they could take would be to simply say, on their website, "This site considers itself to be part of the Wikimedia Movement". (alternate text welcome )
Later, a self-identified affiliate could be formally designated as "part of the Wikimedia Movement" by the global community or the foundation or both.
Such recognition would have lots of benefits for the new projects that share our values-- other WM projects would know to visibly link to them whenever they have relevant content (as we currently do across WMF projects). We could permit access to the unified login, we could allow template-sharing or image-sharing. We could set up interwiki-linking, and other interoperability functions.
Such recognition would have even bigger benefits for us. We could get an affiliation with an established, successful project that shares our values. The kinds of project that we would build ourselves if someone else hadn't already built it. Their userbases and readership would see get to Wikimedia as something larger than just WP, and it would help cement public understanding that Wikimedia is a Movement, very big, very diverse, and very special.
; 2-- We need a name for self-identified project affiliation.
External projects needs to be able to claim, on their own initiative, that they are "part of" something. That something should be a something that is connected to us.
But self-identified affiliation has no gatekeeper, so whatever it is new projects can be "part of", there could be lots that we don't approve of.
I'm the founder of a project and I want signal my ideological affiliation to WM. I think my own project's values match the Wikimedia's values, in my opinion anyway.
Recognizing that I may or may not be right-- what should I say I am a "part of"?
We could just tell projects in this situation to say they are "Part of the Wikimedia Movement", but perhaps that name is one we want to reserve just for officially recognized projects. If so, what name should such projects use instead?
Note that they need to be saying something different than just "I like Wikipedia, here's a link". They need to be _identifying_ their own efforts as _under the umbrella_ of what we do. They need to be "investing" in us and our mission, saying "This project is our attempt to help share the world's information".
Right now, I think we can craft any statement, logo, or button we want and like-minded projects would use it if prompted. We just have to be thoughtful about what we want those things to look like. We will no longer have total control over whichever name or logos we recommend projects use for self-identified affiliation.
So that's my question -- what should third-party wikis say they are "part of", if they want to express a connection to us?
Alec