Aubrey,
2013/4/24 Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com
I feel that we could boost a lot the idea of a "family of projects", of an integrated, global, comprehensive approach to knowledge. Right now, the fact is that Wikipedia both attracts and cannibalizes users to/from sister projects, which are kinda invisible if you don't know they exist.
Could we promote better our sister projects, making them more visible? For this purpose, user Micru and me just created a RfC for interproject links
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Interproject_links_inte... (I invite you all to propose other solutions), but the underlying question is if we, as the Wikimedia community, are aware of the "theoretical" shift this means.
The strongest promotion -- and actually your proposal goes into this direction -- would be to rebrand the sister projects, and then integrate them tighter. A first step, and a necessity before any further integration could happen, would be to give up the many different brands the Wikimedia movement has, and huddle together under one flag.
As said, your proposal suggests that - it doesn't say "Wikiquote", it just says "Quotes", etc. This basically means that it is not Wikiquote anymore, but Wikipedia Quotes.
Without that, I am afraid, such a strong integration between the projects always remains fragile and touchy, because the projects - if they are not mere supporting projects like Commons or Wikidata anyway - might feel offended and debranded every time they are integrated in such a way.
Having said that, this thread is half hijacked by "what are projects, how important are they, what kind of support do they need" instead of discussint the original topic.
Cheers, Denny