On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 09:35:14PM -0800, Rich Holton wrote: It does. Also it's fun to laugh about folks and journalists who are too stupid to know the difference between Wikipedia and a wiki. ciao, tom -- == Weblinks == * http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen * http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32 * http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden

An encyclopedia in the form of a wiki. My God, we can't have somone calling that a Wikipedia! Thanks for the laugh, Michael. On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:27:58 -0800, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote:

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 22:20:23 -0200, Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa <ribamar.sousa(a)ic.unicamp.br> wrote: But what if, as Rich Holton said, someone uses the term for something that goes completely against our goals, or in such a way that our image is tarnished? Or even, as I suggested, people deliberately trading off our name and publicity? And, as I mentioned, what about the confusion of people thinking that Wikipedia is the place to discuss things that have nothing to do with it, because they are "a wikipedia"? (Hmm, he thinks evilly, this might get some people thinking...) What if Microsoft decided to rebrand Encarta as "Microsoft Wikipedia" to make people think they were getting something new, and equal in quality to the "real" Wikipedia...? Having a name that uniquely identifies Wikipedia as being Wikipedia is very useful, and enforcing it as a trademark is the only way we can be sure of having such a name. What would we say if it became truly generic "the Real Wikipedia"? "the original and still the best"? "the Wikipedia wikipedia"? -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

Rowan Collins wrote: Well, I do think Wikimedia has picked a rather poor naming scheme in terms of enforcing a unique brand, although I'm not sure what to best do about it. The scheme is essentially Wiki____, where the ____ is the project-specific name, but that's a completely generic naming scheme, because we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the prefix "wiki". This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of knowing without investigating. So you end up with the confusing situation where it's: Wikipedia? that's us. Wikitravel? that's someone else. Wikibooks? that's us. Wikicities? that's someone else. (etc.) -Mark

--- Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: No more generic than 'The New York Times.' 'New York' is generic, and 'Times' is one of several generic names for newspapers. Yet put together it is a very enforceable trademark. That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of our projects. -- mav __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com

Daniel Mayer wrote: I support that we add the global wikimedia logo on all the projects, in the place of the GNU FDL button. We already say "GNU FDL" in the text portion. The global wikimedia logo should be linked to the foundation website. --Jimbo

Thinking about this, I came up with another idea: use a distinctive colour scheme. The colours in the Wikimedia logo are actually quite distinctive, and we already have one other logo using them (the commons, although no-one's got round to colouring the arrows green yet, which would make it even more consistent). And one of the problems is that other projects using the MediaWiki software have a default look more-or-less identical to the Wikimedia sites. So what I was thinking, is perhaps we could have a "Wikimedia-monobook" skin that just had subtle shadings of that particular blue, green, and red; this could then not be distributed with the software [and we could probably even claim it as a trademark ;)] I tried to do a mockup of what I mean with the GIMP, but didn't do very well. What do people think, as a concept? -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]