On 5/8/07, Dmcdevit dmcdevit@cox.net wrote:
Kelly Martin wrote:
Indeed, the proper response to the lower profile of the other projects is to advertise them more heavily, not to submerge them further.
This may or may not be off topic, but one thing we are terrible at is cross-project community support. The submerged projects are largely our own doing. Mostly this is because most editors are (and I mean this factually, not disparagingly) wrapped up in their own work and project, and not necessarily connected to the wider Wikimedia mission or free content, and not well-acquainted with the other projects. From my perspective as a dual Wiktionarian and Wikipedian, I would say a huge proportion of Wikipedia articles that could have crossproject templates (i.e. {{wiktionary}}), which is most of the non-proper noun, non-phrase articles (100s K?) lack them. There is virtually no use of internal linking between the projects, even though it is [[wikt:easy|]], as easy as linking to another namespace. We should link all technical terms, and lists of terms, phrases, etc., from Wikipedia to Wiktionary instead; whereas now we have crappy stub articles or neverending terms lists on them, we could have more more useful dictionary articles, which affords etymologies, parts of speech, dictionary-style citations, audio pronunciations, and translations.
Agreed with this post, Brianna's thoughtful analysis, and SJ's note on one-word identifiers for the projects being a good thing: perhaps the thing to work on is not the external "branding" of Wikibooks et al, but how they are thought of and treated within Wikipedia culture. Since Wikipedia does generate most of the traffic going toward the Wikimedia projects, a big push to raise the profile of the sister projects within Wikipedia through interwikis, better templates, highlighting "Other Wikimedia Projects" whenever possible, etc would likely do wonders for both traffic and new contributors for these projects. Yes, given our high profile a rebranding campaign would garner a lot of media attention, as they often do (it seems like American television is always running advertisements for one phone company merging with another) -- but it would not address or create what's at the *core* of success for wiki-driven projects: a happy, growing and productive userbase, and usefulness to the reading public. This we can only build through internal community work; more support from all the Wikipedias would help a lot. There should not be a conflict between thinking of Wiktionary, say, as both an independent project -- "the world's best free online dictionary!" -- and as a useful extension for Wikipedia -- "oh yeah, that's where we always link to for word definitions."
As someone else noted, the difference between using "wiki" and "wikipedia" is becoming increasingly blurred in the outside world. If this is indeed the case, it's not *wikipedia* that's becoming the strongest brand -- it's the concept of *wiki*, which is reflected in all of our names. There is nothing at all stopping us from keeping the existing official project names AND internally using the "books -- dictionary -- sources" templates that Erik proposes, which are catchy and to-the-point, and will help draw in contributors to those projects.
-- phoebe