I wouldn't agree with rebranding Wikimedia to Wikipedia and calling all the projects in such a way ('Wikibooks, a Wikipedia project). I remember a fruit juice company in the Netherlands doing exactly that: their main (and most well known product) was an orange juice called 'Appelsientje', but they had lots of other juices with different, but similar names ('Pompelmoentje', 'Tomatientje', 'Goudappeltje', all with 'tje' behind the word). Because their orange juice was the most well-known they decided to rebrand all their fruit juices with the 'Appelsientje' brand. For example: 'Goudappeltje' (which was apple juice) was rebranded as 'Appelsientje apple juice'. The rebranding wasn't the success they hoped for, and after a few years they reversed a few of the original names because people couldn't find their apple juice on the shelves and were afraid that they were buying orange juice instead of apple juice. The same might be true if we would rebrand all projects in such a way: people looking for Wikibooks might be confused that they are on Wikipedia instead of Wikibooks. I think you can see from this example that rebranding is a very difficult process and might induce confusion. We already have a row of brands that all have something in common (the word 'wiki' somewhere in the brand). The current situation leads to two problems: 1) The Wikipedia/Wikimedia confusion 2) 'wiki' is not a trademark, and could therefore be used by anyone, leading to confusion about who own the project (e.g. 'Wikitravel' is not a WM foundation project). The first problem could be solved by simply being consistent in always talking about the 'Wikimedia Foundation' instead of 'Wikimedia' to anyone who could possibly be confused about the name. The second problem is a little harder to tackle. The solution to that is IMHO a combination of mentioning the name 'Wikimedia' somewhere prominently on the project page (more so than right now) with a consistent graphical design across the projects. All the projects are already consistent in design using monobook as a standard skin, but because every Mediawiki installation carries that skin every new Mediawiki installation looks like another Wikimedia project. Maybe we should develop a new skin that is visually different than monobook (and is not included with the Mediawiki installation) and use that across all projects. -- Hay Kranen / [[User:Husky]] On 5/10/07, Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 10/05/07, Cary Bass <cbass(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I read Danny's email as talking about the answer machine message rather than what people say when they actually answer the phone.

Mathias Schindler wrote: /me tried to stay serious but fail to :-) Cary found the "bug". Danny was correct. He said "I have since found out that there was a voice mail message, being provided by our building management, that did state "Wikipedia Foundation". This was not, however, an employee of the Foundation / or an intern, but of the management company, and now has been resolved." I tried again tonight. I got a message this time... telling me the voice message system was full :-) Did you guys all tried ? ant