On 5/8/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
What will recognition of WMF projects be like in another five years? Who can tell? But if you envision as I do, eventually a global presence for WMF, a reputation for free access & license quality content in multiple languages, then it seems short-sighted to rename everything after Wikipedia just because it is our most well known project right now.
Not at all. First of all, the understanding of Wikipedia as a resource expressed here is very limited. Wikipedia is unlike any encyclopedia in history. See, for example, these blog posts where I pointed out some of its unique characteristics:
http://intelligentdesigns.net/blog/?p=61 - in how it deals with current events http://intelligentdesigns.net/blog/?p=54 - in its sourcing methods http://intelligentdesigns.net/blog/?p=57 - in its scope
which is only really scratching the surface of the surface. And see http://intelligentdesigns.net/blog/?p=60 for some thoughts about its future potential for growth and restructuring. We happen to have called Wikipedia an "encyclopedia", and this semantic classification can be useful. But a higher level of abstraction is necessary in order to understand its social and cultural role as well as its potential for growth.
Wikipedia, in its design, is a universal "first stop" for knowledge. It is not a textbook that you consult for in-depth learning, or an online course that you take. It is not a collection of quotations that you use to look things up when you want a nice quote for your PowerPoint presentation. This universality will not change as long as we're still in this rough conceptual space.
Wikipedia will therefore remain a strong and probably our strongest brand. Perhaps Wikinews and Wikiversity would have similar universal appeal if they could grow in the same way, though we have clearly seen so far that these dynamics of growth do not apply. It is unreasonable to think that we would ever look "silly" for naming other projects in connection with Wikipedia, anymore than it is unreasonable for Google to name their projects after their search engine & company (Google News, Books, Mail, etc.).
The second mistake that people make in this discussion is that the broader public understanding of Wikipedia is not identical to our community's own nerdy conception thereof. A common argument through this thread has been "But project so and so is not an encyclopedia, so it should not be called Wikipedia Xy, that's confusing!"
You might want to ask yourself, then, why people ever starterd writing dictionary entries, collections of quotations, source materials, or instructional texts on Wikipedia in the first place. This was, after all, a primary motivation for spinning off these projects! Literally, in its early days, Wikipedia _was_ used for all these things, if only on a small scale.
Clearly, many contributors did not feel limited by the notion that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia in the traditional sense". We built policies to express that notion, and it was probably a good idea to spin off more focused communities (though I sometimes have my doubts about that). But we have to explain explicitly to people, again and again, what Wikipedia is not, because it is _not_ obvious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not
The idea that "Wikipedia is making a dictionary" or "Wikipedia is making course materials" is not at all counter-intuitive to most people who have never been washed in Wikipedia's culture and its nerdy battles for semantics. Indeed, it is the opposite notion -- that there is a thing that's called Wikimedia that runs Wikipedia, and also those other things -- that tends to lead to confusion.
For example, just in the last few months a potential partner believed Wikiversity to be a separate organization, even at a fairly late stage in our discussions. But the more common case is that people ask me "So, Wikimedia is .... Wikipedia?" Some might even suspect that it's some kind of scam trying to ride on the Wikipedia trademark.
So I strongly agree with what has been said about the Wikimedia naming issue being the most serious of them all. I would already be quite content if, for instance, we were named the "Free Knowledge Foundation" (analogous to the FSF). That particular name appears to be taken though.
It seems to me many of our projects are ahead of their time. I guess they will struggle for recognition and popularity until the world catches up. Renaming them won't change that.
Again, even in a best case scenario, I do not think that any other project will overtake Wikipedia's popularity and brand recognition. Perhaps, in our wildest dreams, some can reach comparable size (which would not necessarily make the Wikipedia branding approach problematic any more so than GMail's popularity makes it a bad idea to call it "Google Mail"). But so far, the differences are orders of magnitude large.
This proposal really surprises me, because I feel there is already a perception from non-[English ]Wikipedia projects the Board only cares about English Wikipedia, and that they are not getting the support they want. Suggesting "hey, just rename yourself under Wikipedia and boom, success!" doesn't seem to me that it will go down well.
Clearly not, as the reactions to this posting demonstrate -- a lot of people would get quite pissed. But so far I have not seen convincing rational arguments beyond that, and I believe the emotional impact can be dealt with by implementing the changes gradually and involving the community in the process as much as possible.
Speaking for my involvement with Commons, I want success for Commons on its own terms. Not just as a service project to Wikipedia.
The naming does not at all imply that it would be a service project.
: Other Wikipedia Projects: Sources | Textbooks | Quotes | Dictionary | Media | Species | News | Learning
We don't need to wait for a rebranding to do something very similar to this, do we?
Probably not. Though, admittedly, my conviction that we should rebrand the projects soon has only grown through the discussion so far.
- Recognition of Wikipedia as flagship removes some of the media
pressure that every new project has to immediately (or ever) be just as successful, which may very well be completely unrealistic.
What 'media pressure' are you referring to?
Look at the initial coverage about Wikinews as a fine example.
Does WMF care if its other projects are or aren't 'successful'? http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-April/029773.html
Of course. That does not mean that we should not face new and exciting challenges, especially if there are good windows of opportunity. I will respond in more detail regarding LP in the coming days.
- Discourages tribal thinking about projects, where even highly
experienced Wiki[mp]edians are treated with as much suspicion as any newbie when they join another Wiki-* project.
I don't see a URL change changing that. While some communities can be overzealously protective, a certain amount of protectiveness strikes me as a good thing. There's a reason why almost all projects have a policy page that amounts to 'We are not Wikipedia, don't do things the Wikipedia way because we do them differently here'.
Yes and no. Tribalism can be enormously harmful. The mess we tried to clean up with the licensing policy is an example of that; there has been non-free creep in a number of projects & languages due to a desire to do things "differently." And, to some extent, the response to that policy has been very aggressive and hostile. "Who are these people to make policy for our project? We're not Wikimedia, we're Wiki-xy." Of course, only a tiny minority of users feel that way. But it's exactly that kind of attitude that a broader communal identity might counteract. It would be meaningful to say "We are all Wikipedians. We share these values." Wikimedia, on the other hand, is a detached concept, which seems to be related by many to notions of bureaucracy and management, rather than genuine community.
I do not deny that each project should have reasonable leeway to develop policies that make sense for its application. But I do not see any reason to believe that the rebranding would have a negative impact on that ability. Wikimedia seems to generally have an inexhaustible supply of complaints when things don't go the way people want them to. It's the opposite (harmony through shared values) where we have deficiencies.
No. At the moment Wikipedia and Wikibooks and Wikinews etc are all conceptually on the same level. But Wikipedia and Wikipedia Textbooks and Wikipedia News? These latter two are conceptually at a lower level. Reorganising projects like this would not "merely" reduce confusion, it would change people's perceptions about the relations between these entities...and their relative importance.
Do people think of Google's various services as being less important than their primary service at google.com? Perhaps, a little bit. The search is their flagship product. Wikipedia is ours, and will likely remain so for quite a long time. But in general, the name serves more as an identifier of an association with a known and (hopefully increasingly so) trusted entity.
With thousands of wikis out there, "Wikiversity" or "Wikisource" don't tell you anything about the origin of the project at all. Either people think it's just another wiki, or they think that _everything_ that starts with "Wiki" belongs to us. And when we do answer, our answer is cumbersome and confusing: "Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia .."
- This will crush small projects under the juggernaut of the evil
Wikipedia and divert even more attention from them. => There is no basis for such assumptions; indeed, it is quite reasonable to suppose that identification with the strong "Wikipedia" brand will make it _easier_ to resolve the particular technical needs of Wikipedia News, Wikipedia Sources, etc. Raising money and developing partnerships for Wikipedia is relatively easy, compared with a project hardly anybody has ever heard of.
Why not just use the phrases "Wikipedia Sources" etc with potential developers right now, then?
Because people will shout at me if I do it? ;-) Seriously, I'd be more than happy to use these names in the context of communications with third parties if authorized to do so.
I'd appreciate other critical commentary on this brand model. Frankly, I see very few benefits in the strategy we have chosen to adopt (perhaps more as a habit than as a result of careful deliberation).
I'm guessing that's because brand recognition wasn't at the forefront of people's minds when they mused about potential project names. e.g. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-March/011854.html :)
Actually quite the opposite. In the full project proposal,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_plan
I explained that "Wikimedia" should be an explicit part of the name to strengthen the WMF brand. To some extent, that has succeeded, though Commons itself is not that widely recognized yet in my experience. But, at the time, I did not realize how problematic the Wikipedia/Wikimedia naming confusion would in fact be in the future. (To my own embarrassment, I contributed to making things worse by strongly supporting and partially implementing the software name change to MediaWiki.)
Making such a major change merely in service of brand recognition seems backward to me, especially given that we're not selling anything.
General brand recognition is one of the arguments for this change, but it is hardly the only one I gave. And while we're not selling anything, surely we want to spread knowledge widely, and our messaging to be clear.