Erik Moeller wrote:
Currently, many projects are trying (and not rarely succeeding) to get their own identity, with their own plans and functions. By renaming them to "Wikipedia something", we would be telling them that that is not the way we want to go.
I understand the emotional reasons for projects to have their "own identity," rather than being directly associated with Wikipedia through their name. What are the rational ones?
Other than the fact that projects like Wikibooks have already established a brand identity of its own. Not only among Wikibooks users, but also within the general academic community (for good or ill). I'm not suggesting here that the brand isn't weaker than Wikipedia, but it does have some strong recognition by groups of users well beyond just Wikimedia projects.
If this had been something suggested when Karl Wick was trying to move the Chemistry "textbook" off of Wikipedia, that would be something else entirely. In fact, a suggestion back elsewhen was to name what is currently called "Wikibooks" to be "Wikiversity" instead.
Words mean things, and as has happened with even the name "Wikiversity", the mere suggestion as a location for learning resources has taken on a life of its own. Becoming "Wikipedia Textbooks" has other major semantic implications as well, not all of them very positive to what has become Wikibooks. This also is suggesting that all of this brand recognition that has been developed to date deserves to be ignored completely. Admittedly this is the brand recognition that Wikipedia had in 2003, but there is reason to believe that Wikibooks can grow substantially without the pressing need to go through such a rebranding as expressed in this proposal. Substantial traffic already comes from Wikipedia as it is going to Wikibooks (through links on Wikipedia pages and listing on the front page), as well as from other sister projects. And I support this continued cross linking between projects as something very positive for everybody involved.
So my question I would ask in reverse is what real benefits would happen by this closer association, and how could the negative aspects (such as increased vandalism and more) be compensated for without the sister projects being forced to coalesce into one common user base and content administration? Is there any value at all to the separate identities and policies that have been established for each of the independent sister projects?
I know you aren't proposing a full merger of all administrators and all policies on all projects in a given language, but that is the logical conclusion to any such rebranding and community merger.
-- Robert Horning