Anthony, The "Stichting Open Progress" owns the domain "WiktionaryZ". We were told by the Wikimedia Foundation that we could not use the name WiktionaryZ for our project when it sadly became clear that our project would, for now, not be a WMF project. Consequently we had to suffer the pain of renaming / rebranding our project to OmegaWiki. We own the domain and it is still generating traffic .. Almost all occurrences of the name WiktionaryZ have been changed to OmegaWiki except for some pointers that indicate that we have a history. This history is ours. It is as unthinkable for the WMF to use the phrase WiktionaryZ as it is indeed our domain. For Erik there is no conflict of interest as the name WiktionaryZ is no issue at all; we do not use it. On an organisational level, Open Progress and the Wikimedia Foundation are in my opinion sister organisations who work very much together to achieve the same or similar goals. The role that Erik plays in the Stichting Open Progress and the role that Erik plays in the Wikmedia Foundation is known to both organisations. So when there is a potential conflict of interest it is a declared conflict of interest. The technology and the data of OmegaWiki are respectively Free Software and Open Content. We aim to provide technology and we hope / expect that this functionality we are developing in Open Progress will be used where applicable. Thanks, Gerard Meijssen Voorzitter Stichting Open Progress On 5/8/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:

On 5/8/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: Aside from the factual incorrectness of the statement (no company called OW, my work so far has been as an independent contractor), I do not consider this a Covered Transaction under COI as - the impact you allege is not the intent - it is not specifically targeted at Wiktionary, but a broad strategic proposal - a community discussion is one of the least problematic transactions conceivable. If other Board members disagree with my understanding of the situation, they will tell me so (and J-B in particular has been rightly vocal in pointing out COIs where they exist). -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

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? -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

On 5/8/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: If it ain't broke, don't fix it? -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

On Tue, May 8, 2007 12:57, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: is answered by Yann Forget: As Walter Vermeir notes: but, as Eric's original post on our branding pointed out, the vast majority of *readers* do not understand about our multiple projects that are all under that single umbrella and hence they don't make use of the sister projects to anything like the same degree. And if our editors are building walls between the projects then is it any surprise that the media and non-editing readers get completely muddled about things? "Wiki..." naming was great when we started. Wikis were new, unusual, fantastic opportunities to get involved and we had a najor first-mover advantage. But using that format for the newer projects hasn't worked so well; they don't get the pull-along effect that they should from their association with 'the big one'. Yes, of course I like everyone else would like to see *all* the projects become massive successes; each language, each context. But until it is clear to people that we are all together in this - that Wikispecies, Wiktionary, Wikinews and the rest *are* under that same umbrella that Wikipedia is - then readers will not use them in the same way and they will, imho, be destined to remain in the shade of Wikipedia. Wikia gets tied up with people thinking about Wiki(m|p)edia projects precisely because of that naming decision (accident?), as do WikitionaryZ, Wikitravel, etc. Editors, unsurprisingly, become somewhat possessive of their efforts (I do too!) but if we are serious about wanting to create a 'reference shelf' then I believe Eric's post - and the subsequent discussions - have clear merit. I believe we do not want not desire the 'other' projects to have a separate identity and target audience, we want them to be seen as part of a greater whole. And whilst "Wikimedia" was intended to be the title of that 'umbrella whole' it is failing to reach the mass audience, instead every time one of us talks to the press or gives a talk or writes about "Wikimedia" we have to explicitly clarify and link that name to "... the people who run Wikipedia ...". It will cause problems in the short term, obviously, but maybe we do need to think more clearly about the future context we operate in; we are not a range of social groups who happen to be working on our individual projects and ignoring the rest (or *should* not be, anyway) but are a larger group of people working, pro bono, to "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." If we are truly creating that "sum" of knowledge then we need a better way to let everyone know all our projects are together. "That's our commitment" as our strapline states. Alison Wheeler

On Wed, May 9, 2007 11:07, Sebastian Moleski wrote: But I believe that is the problem we currently have! That list of brands don't market to the same target audiences, and they demonstrate few synergies between them so thay have no need to target similar markets directly, however eachof our 'products' *do* target the same people, and that means (imho) that we do need a much clearer "umbrella" to be visible 'out there'. A further example; Answers.com runs "WikiAnswers". If we stick ad absurdam with our "Wiki...." convention then how many people will think that "WikiAnswers" is one of ours, when it isn't. David Gerard pointed out that We've lost the battle to call everything "Wiki...." and for the general internet population to realise which is 'ours' and which isn't. It will be a shame to lose some of the name recognition that the non-WP projects have gained - though it is clearly minimal so far - but I think there is merit in realising that we need to change our POV and ensure that non-editors realise that we have more than the one (WP) project. Alison Wheeler

On 5/9/07, Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote: That's what I was hinting at as well. Wikisource doesn't have the same target audience in regards to use or contribution as Wikipedia. If that's not obvious to some, think about what input is necessary to create content in Wikipedia versus one in Wikisource. And also think what Wikipedia content is used for versus what Wikisource content is used for. Beside, we should not think in terms of commercial products for our There, you've lost me. Brands don't need to be commercial to exist. In that I agree with Erik. Wikisource, Commons, Wikipedia et al. are brands. They have a value and an identity, the extent of which however differs wildly between Wikipedia and the other projects. As you even said yourself though, we have to differentiate between users and contributors. These are different roles with different interests, needs and motivations even if often they may be filled by the same people. To contributors, Wikimedia as an organization and a cause may be very important thus internal communication should recognize and advance that. To users, the foundation is largely irrelevant and there's no real need to change that. For users, what matters is what they get out of the projects and what they can use it for. Of course, this is all conjecture and just my personal perspective on things. When we're talking about brands, products, positioning, etc. it would really help to engange in some of the activities marketing departments at larger organizations cover. That is, actually identifying what roles people who interact with the projects fill, what interests and needs they have, what they know and don't know, etc. This of course calls for professional assistance from people experienced in the field, something Wikimedia should be able to tap. sm

On 09/05/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: But a) We don't even hold fundraisers on a regular basis yet (why not three regularly every year? with the election coming up it will probably be at least three months until we hold another...) and b) How does renaming the projects generate funds? unless we are renaming them "Google Wikipedia Books" :) cheers Brianna

Florence Devouard a écrit : Ok, granted. I was more thinking of "we have that much cash, which competitor we buy, which new products do we start, where do we invest next?" Yann -- http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres

Alison Wheeler schreef: But who are the wikis that costs all the money? That must be EN Wikipedia and the rest of the top 5 or 6 wikipedias and commons. The others wikis may have not a lot fund raising power but the do not need it because the are so small. My total yearly operating budget for wikizine is about 30 euro. I know that is not the same but even with a couple of zeros after it the cost on the total budget for the smaller wikis must be pocket change. -- Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community New: "Wikizine auf Deutsch" and "Wikizine en Español"

On 10/05/07, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia(a)alisonwheeler.com> wrote: Names are, however, important. Consider the tragedy of Usenet group comp.windows.news ... Having an inappropriate name for a project will affect that project adversely. I do understand your and Erik's point, but there's got to be a way to do this, should it be considered desirable, without alienating the volunteer base. Much like putting ads on the site. - d.

Your last sentence raises an important distinction. Which is more appropriate? "Wikimedia is the greatest free project on the planet" or "Wikimedia is incubating and supporting the greatest free projects on the planet" ? SJ

On 10/05/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: BTW - this is one reason, when the press call trying to stir up a fight between us and Citizendium, I always say they're a good thing because more freely-reusable content is good, they validate the model and encouraging free content is something we're absolutely for. (I know they still haven't picked their actual license. If they pick one that *isn't* a proper free content licence ... well.) Has anyone approached Scholarpedia about free content licensing, by the way? They wouldn't need to change a single thing about the Scholarpedia model - just require new works to be free content. - d.

On 11/05/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is one reason I want to talk up free content as an important part of what we are. Erik would be the person for this, but he may be just a touch busy ... is there anyone who routinely works on this sort of thing? It's of almost-direct interest to WMF's interests to make free content *normal*. - d.

David Gerard, My impression is that Larry Sanger would be happy if Citizendium in turn enriches wikipedia.

2007/5/8, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: The rational one is that many projects feel that they are an independent project with its own goals and functions, and not an auxiliary project to Wikipedia. Which they would look like under your proposal. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

On 5/8/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Indeed, the proper response to the lower profile of the other projects is to advertise them more heavily, not to submerge them further. The Wikimedia Commons is not "a Wikipedia-brand image repository"; don't turn it into one. Kelly

On 5/8/07, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote: {{Strong support}} Agreed. Delphine -- ~notafish NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will probably get lost.

Kelly Martin wrote: 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. Unfortunately, all my attempts to do so so far have ironically met with people branding me a deletionist and vigorously defending their article on *their* project, with no concept of the parallel goals of projects like Wiktionary. People know Wiktionary is a wiki, but it's a foreign project to them. Transwiki should be a *process* not a deletion process, and instead of throwing things in the perceived trash heap of other projects, transwikied content should be integrated into Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia lends almost no manpower to helping with the cleanup of (massive amounts of) stuff transferred to Wiktionary, and consequently, it mostly languishes without entering the main namespace. This isn't all Wikipedia's fault: Wiktionary has never really made any internal effort to take on the transwiki process, and also lacks the equivalent {{wikipedia}} templates on most relevant articles, and furthermore, has increasingly been becoming more receptive of encyclopedic content. My suggestions to get rid of encyclopedic entries like placenames, brand names, names of TV shows, etc., have met with similar "inclusionist" resistance, when every failed search of those points the reader to the more useful Wikipedia article. ("Perhaps there is an article [[X]] in our sister encyclopedia project, Wikipedia.") While I love the identities of both projects, we need to find a way to do that without making them foreign to each other, as that is a very bad way of promoting our long-term goals. Dominic

On 5/8/07, Dmcdevit <dmcdevit(a)cox.net> wrote: 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

On Wed, 9 May 2007, Florence Devouard wrote: Lovely. We should try doing this all the time, to remind members of all projects how they fit in with the tapestry of wiki culture, and where to look for cross-links and ties across projects, while we labour to make the overlays between the projects work smoothly, and the conceptual project barriers transparent. SJ

You also dilute the value of the Wikipedia brand itself. Currently, it is associated most strongly with an encyclopedia; if you change that (e.g. "Wikipedia Species", "Wikipedia News", then the brand itself becomes less focused. Using the sword of name recognition goes both ways. Titoxd. -----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Erik Moeller Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 4:41 AM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Rethinking brands 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? -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Erik Moeller wrote: 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

Erik Moeller wrote: I think you are mistaken at the extent that Wikibooks is recognized independently of Wikipedia. While certainly Wikipedia does get much more press and comment, there have been independent journal articles and blog (outside of the "wikiblogosphere") commentaries about Wikibooks. Reviews of individual Wikibooks have also been mentioned, particular on those topics which have been rather well developed. I'm also curious about what metric you are using to suggest that "everyone who has heard of Wikibooks knows Wikipedia". I know for a fact that there are many individuals who contribute to Wikibooks that have never made an edit on Wikipedia, and often it is their very first time at using a Wiki of any kind. My metric is the interaction I've had with users by being a local administrator on en.wikibooks and participating on the other language editions of Wikibooks. French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Polish and German editions of Wikibooks also all have very active communities and even interact with each other on a fairly substantial level as well, as well as participants on the other 40 or so other active Wikibook projects. As I've tried to mention on previous posts, Wikibooks is by far and away the largest independent e-book website on the internet, at least if you compare sites with Alexa. It is has more hits than Project Gutenberg, or even most comercial e-book websites. The only numbers I can't compare to are websites like Microsoft and Adobe, where breaking out the stats for just e-books pages is just a shot in the dark. And frankly Wikibooks has stumbled upon this status in a very haphazard fashion with nearly nobody on the board level even noticing. You can compare site rankings about e-books here: http://www.alexa.com/browse?&CategoryID=104589 I would call that a brand worth trying to keep. While this may also be an indictment on e-book in general (or the lack of popularity of e-book in any format), Wikibooks is clearly at the top of the game in this category. This isn't to say that there aren't problems on Wikibooks that need to be fixed, but you can't find any website that offers free e-books (as in beer or copyleft) that even comes close to what Wikibooks does right now. The only real "competition" is Wikisource and the Gutenberg Project, which Wikibooks tries to maintain cordial relationships with members of both of those communities as well. Sure, compared to Wikipedia it is small fry, but compared to most other websites it has a demographic and draw that most for profit coporations would kill for. It certainly has more visitors and a bigger audience than most Linux distros, if you want to make a comparison to other sorts of collaborative projects. In general terms for user innovation and involvement on the projects, I would rank them as such: Wikipedia > Commons > Wiktionary > Wikinews > Wikiversity > Wikibooks > Wikisource > Wikiquote >>> Wikispecies (substantially down the list). You could argue about the placement of the various sister projects projects in terms of user involvement, and I would consider most of the sister projects except for Wiktionary and Wikipedia to be roughly identical in terms of user involvement and activity with some differences mainly due to the nature of each project. Page counts would give some slightly different rankings as would other metrics, but I would question page ranks as a conclusive comparison between the various projects.

On 5/8/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: As Wikiquotian, I would love to see Wikiquote offers to quote archive service to Wikipedia as well other our sister projects, but it is not our principal goal in my understanding. We are not mere Wikipedia appendices. Besides that, since in the modern world "-pedia" is often used for refering something encyclopedia alike, names alike "XXpedia Books" "XXpedia Dictionary" would be confusable. I've seen some people failed to distinguish dictionary from encyclopidia, and vice versa, but I am not sure such ambiguity is helpful for increasing our "recognition" in the long term. Agreed. And I think it pretty well. is there any good reason not to add such an index in the page "Other Wikimedia projects: ......"? -- KIZU Naoko Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org * habent enim emolumentum in labore suo *

On 5/9/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: You don't understand my points. I am here talking about publications which contains "pedia" as part of their brand names. Encarta isn't the case. In Japan we have seen many -pedia named publications (most of them are published by major companies. I got 50 results with -pedia suffixed paper publifications on amazon.co.jp. Some of them seem to be textbook (or very narrow interest encyclopedia) but no atlas, dictionary, media collection or quote books. And I would point out those materials you called has weeker brand image or nothing, and don't make the connotation of -pedia suffix broader. Another concerns, for some people, even Wikipedia is a word too long to recognize. For them It is not only a buzz word, but also nonsense foreign-sound words. I have seen many Japanese people who call wikipedia "wiki" (there as even a campaign "don't call it Wiki"). The brand name is not so globally established as you wishes, specially in non Indo-European language areas. I don't expect much longer Wikipedia blah blah blah is memory-friendly for those people. -- KIZU Naoko Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org * habent enim emolumentum in labore suo *

Brianna, lovely post, as ever. Interesting thread; while I feel the energy spent thinking about branding is slightly misdirected, energy spent towards helping the projects gain further definition and individual identity would not be (and many of the results - including stronger sense of identity and stronger recognition - would be). I like the idea of focusing each project on a single word that defines what it does, for use in interproject templates, independent of resolving the naming issue. SJ

Florence Devouard wrote: Anthere, Thanks for clarifying. The USPTO Trademark Office is not like Wikipedia in that you can "edit this trademark" whenever you want, and given the investment in securing a trademark, the entire thread evidenced a startling lack of understanding as to why trademarks should go on a slow path. I was wondering what the Board was thinking, but you have clarified that this is not a Board topic at present. Thanks Jeff

Florence Devouard wrote: Permit me if I may, there have been many "suggestions" that have been made on this list recently with the seeming official stamp of approval (some with notes of discussion of the WMF board, others not so much), and this is the thinking of at least one member of that board. Quite often discussions like this quickly turn into actual policy and have impact directly on individual projects, and this is a radical policy change. And this proposal/suggestion was not made in the context of any upcoming elections or any campaign platform. In this case, some substantial opposition to this proposal has been voiced, and there is some concern that this may have even more widespread support among board members than just this one individual. Since most of us aren't privy to most board discussions, it can be difficult to tell if this is something that has been discussed at length previously or simply a random thought. I do appreciate that you have voiced at least a neutral attitude toward this idea as perhaps a future direction for Wikimedia projects.

David Gerard wrote: That was not sniping. That was a statement. And even though it is denied, I believe it is true. If others do not, that is fine by me. Whatever. I think YOU are the one sniping here. The only thing I ask here, is that a proposition, by whoever board member - be it Erik (on brands), or Jimbo (on search engines), or I (on governance) or anyone else, be seen as a proposition by a person by default, rather than Foundation, unless stated otherwise. I am not worried. Even when a comment is presented as Foundation, that does not prevent you from objecting :-)) Last. Even though I do not agree with the rebranding, I appreciate the discussion. I think Erik presented a pretty clear and straigthforward landscape of benefits and drawbacks. ant

On 5/8/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. 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. 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. The naming does not at all imply that it would be a service project. Probably not. Though, admittedly, my conviction that we should rebrand the projects soon has only grown through the discussion so far. Look at the initial coverage about Wikinews as a fine example. 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. 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. 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 .." 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. 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.) 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. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

On 5/9/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: One former Wikiquote sysop posted a bunch of dumb copies of policies and guidelines from English Wikipedia and labelled them "official policy of project" even not trying to replace the word "Wikipedia" with "Wikiquote". I forgot it when i wrote my latest reply. So perhaps it is not only you to think it a good idea, Erik. * As for service project or not As for identity, I would like to point on Wikipedia we have spent many times so-and-so Wikipedia policy wasn't applied here because they were separate projects. I am not sure if this idea is widely shared. I agree Wikimedia XXX might make a sense semantically, but for recognition I am sceptical in a global context as I wrote before. "Wikimedia Commons" is already confusable with CC, shortened as "Commons" ... at least from google result in Japanese,　this tendency doesn't help to increase recognition. Most of the top ten results on Google in Japanese are related to CC or Lessig's _Commons_, and no result for Wikimedia Commons. Other "Wikimedia + (common name)" may reach the similar end, I suspect. While it could be helpful to increase the recognition on "Wikimedia" brandname, I am not sure how it helps each projects to be recognized. -- KIZU Naoko Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org * habent enim emolumentum in labore suo *

Hoi, When you end this Wikipedia is everything else and now make it Wikipedia is the organisation as well, does that mean that there is a need for an organisation for every project ?? Thanks, GerardM On 5/9/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On 09/05/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: I sometimes envisage Wikinews as a statement. "We know there is this great potential for a sea-change in the way journalism is done; our job isn't to lead that charge, but if it does take off as some people anticipate it will we have this site and community set up to work for it." -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 5/9/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I think your argument is good, if you treat the project communities as a self-contained corporate entity, and only worry about how the name change would work externally. If the WMF were a corporation like Google, with the majority of the work being done by employees who could pretty much just be ordered to go along with the name change, it would probably work. But that's not the way things are. The vast majority of people working on the Commons, and Wikibooks, and Wikinews, and all the other projects, are volunteers. The brand is as much for them as it is for those who merely read the content. Confusing all the volunteers, even if none of the "outsiders" notice, would be extremely problematic. If the name change could somehow be done in a way which doesn't confuse the vast community (many of whom don't speak English well or even at all), it might be a good thing. I haven't really decided if I think it would or not. But at first glance the name change implies to me that Wikipedia is becoming a parent of the other projects. I know that isn't true, but how much time and effort will it take to explain it to the members of all the projects, who don't read this or any of the mailing lists, who don't speak English, etc? I'm not convinced it would work. You might be able to convince me, though. Anthony

It is never too late - lots of big brands decide to change their branding. Its costly. But if we want it, better do it now than over 5 years. On 5/8/07, Piero <pierogra(a)libero.it> wrote:

"Erik Moeller" <erik(a)wikimedia.org> writes: Apart from having difficulties understanding this critique, it is surprising, how in this case you get picky about naming, when on the other hand rebranding many different projects to _pedia, which clearly are not encyclopaediae is just fine for you. ... which means that rebranding will almost certainly not make a big difference. There are many news outlets everywhere, with blogs more and more advancing to a top position. The relatively low attractiveness of Wikinews (here I'm speaking mainly about the German edition) is rooted in what it offers (to both readers and writers), not in how it is called. BTW: When I read "Wikipedia News", my association is "News /about/ Wikipedia", rather than a news portal operated by Wikipedia. Am I the only one? Thanks, Johannes -- http://www.infoe.de/

On 5/8/07, Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)gmail.com> wrote: "Wikimedia" is hardly any better, and leads to the same kind of confusion, partially also due to the inherent complexity of the chapter model. If we followed the model I described, I would suggest always using another word as part of the chapter name, e.g. the equivalent of "Association". -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

On 09 May 2007 21:38:00 +0200, Claus Färber <GMANE(a)faerber.muc.de> wrote: I don't believe so; the Wikipedia brand enjoys the strongest global recognition, so phasing it out would probably be unwise. If we do _not_ phase it out, we continue to suffer from the single largest source of confusion, the Wikipedia/Wikimedia similarity. In fact, we amplify it if we call Wikipedia the "Wikimedia Encyclopedia". But your main point is very valid. It is extremely difficult to protect a name globally. And the less protection you pursue, the more deception by spammers and scammers will ensue. Besides those, we have had a few disputes with truly insane detractors. Given the generic nature of the "wiki" prefix, there will also be an ever-increasing overlap with legitimate ventures. Even Google could not properly protect "GMail"; it still resolves to "Google Mail" in the UK and Germany. We're not in the position of a cereal company that, step by step, sets up operations in different countries. Everything we do is global and multilingual from day 1. Our exploding complexity of brands and domain names across languages & countries poses a huge management problem for an organization of our size. Even for an artificial name like "Wikimedia", people write it in different scripts; the interwiki links for our article about WMF indicate that this is the case in Arabic, Dhivehi, Persian, Gujarati, Hindi, Hebrew, Macedonian, Russian, Sinhalese, Serbian, Tamil, Thai, Yiddish, and Chinese. For the names that are based on real words like "news" or "-pedia", the number of variants is much larger still, and you get names like "Viquinotícies", "Wikinotizie", "Wikiştiri", all referring to the same project. As internationalized domain names take off, things will only get worse. People may complain that giving the Wikipedia brand primacy is horribly unfair. But it is already part of WMF's trademark strategy, which is organized in tiers where we pursue the highest level of protection for brands of high significance. That's the only way to avoid wasting huge amounts of resources on trademark registrations and domain name negotiations, all of which can be quite expensive. In my opinion, it is much more honest to give a project a spin-off name like "Wikipedia News" _unless_ you are also willing to afford the same level of protection to its name _and_ its officially recognized variants that you give to Wikipedia. And, simply put, we cannot afford to do so at present for all our names. You may argue that smaller projects do not need the same level of protection, as abusers are less likely to be interested in them. Unfortunately, parasites do tend to plan ahead. Any new brand we announce widely will generate international interest. If we don't immediately pursue wide protection, we will have to wrestle control from illegitimate owners later. Given its size, Wikimedia has actually done a remarkable job at protecting its interests, and the chapters and local project communities have often helped or led this process. Still, I fear that the challenge is Sisyphean in nature. One reason to simplify brands is quite simple and IMHO appealing: We can free a lot of energy that is currently diverted by whack-a-mole games. Many people are uncomfortable with the notion of giving the Wikipedia brand primacy. Interestingly, however, the practical challenge you raise (which I also pointed out in my original proposal) has hardly been discussed at all, as have other disadvantages of the current brand setup. Names do not, however, exist in a vacuum! One way to address the community concerns is to define criteria (clear milestones, annual review, etc.) for a project to receive its own name. Much like we qualified some projects as "beta", having them officially associated with Wikipedia would recognize that their reality doesn't yet reflect our ambitions. Having such a process could also be a major incentive for a community to reach certain goals. Arguably, if we do recognize at least the _potential_ for projects to obtain independent brands, the organization should not be called "Wikipedia Foundation" -- perhaps it needs a different name entirely. One thing is clear: rebranding is _always_ controversial, in any company or organization. People become attached to names. But when we have a mess like the one we are currently dealing with, it may be necessary to make some people unhappy in order to achieve clarity, consistency and -- importantly -- basic manageability. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

On 5/15/07, hillgentleman <hillgentleman.wikiversity(a)gmail.com> wrote: That depends on how you parse it, and there is a strong argument to be made that the general public will parse it differently from our core community. The kind of literal and semantic arguments found in this thread are unlikely to be made by people who identify "Wikipedia" with a broad notion of a source of knowledge, an online community, and an organization or company. Moreover, one could hardly argue that the name "Wikiversity" is self-explanatory. It is not a university, it does not award degrees, etc. People understand it by visiting the website and looking at the materials there. I believe the name "Wikipedia Learning" is much more explanatory, and any initial misunderstanding (which any name can cause) will disappear as soon as people actually look at the contents. Excuse me? You would seriously argue that "Wikipedia XY" does not stand out among those names? "Wikipedia" is the only name we have that has global recognition, orders of magnitude more so than any of the above. Wikiversity, on the other hand, is on equal footing with all of them. That's a straw man argument; the lines of reasoning (including the e-mail you responded to, most of which you ignored) are more complex than "sheer convenience in marketing". Nor are you proposing any realistic solutions to the problem Claus pointed out. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic