Hoi, Wikipedia is indeed clearly the core global brand. The notion that Wikidata will "never match Wikipedia whatever its future success" is a sad argument. Use some hindsight and compare Wikipedia and its impact with Wikidata at the same age, do the same for Commons. It is also a useless argument because success comes in different shapes and forms and we should foster success and value where we find it. The biggest issue is not to be overwhelmed with the complacency that comes with what is mistaken as the success of English Wikipedia. Complacency because English Wikipedia could be much better.
We know our statistics and English Wikipedia is not 50% of our traffic. It is where over 50% of our resources are spend. It is maintained by a bias for everything related to what we do in English. We promote Wikipedia as a tool for university students and its focus is the USA. The reality is that we need high school students to write articles in most of our other languages. Oh and do not rely on research; Wikipedia research is biased because it is almost exclusively English Wikipedia what is studied. Even when it is not, it relies on studies with the same bias.
When we truly want to be more international, we should focus on raising money outside of the AngloSaxon countries. The money is there, just consider known statistics. Spend everything that is raised "elsewhere", elsewhere and add significant bias where we have the best 'return on investment'. NB it is my business to know fundraising and we under perform in the Netherlands by a large margin. There is no "need" to change our really successful fundraising except when we use it as an instrument to attract attention for our brands.
Both Wikidata and Commons are English. It is not that there are no projects that use other languages within these projects but it is dominantly English in the same way Wikipedia is dominantly English. Giving examples of these projects is mistaking exceptions for the rule. Case in point; show me all the Wikidata editors and show me those editors that do not communicate in English.. show me their success.
When this notion that Wikimedia is English is to be countered, consider how we can share our resources. For me the best example how we miss the boat is found in Wikidata; we were promised an official replacement of Listeria. Listeria is great but not good enough. The promise has not been kept, we are still pissing in the wind and manually updating lists in the Wikipedias.
Please let us have a hard look at the efficiency at which we "share the sum of all knowledge". Once the giddiness has left the house, let us work in earnest and expand the 50% percent of our traffic and serve the underserved. Thanks, GerardM
On Sat, 13 Apr 2019 at 06:38, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
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@gmail.com wrote:
Responses below:
On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 5:07 PM Strainu strainu10@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-collabor...
- 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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