Well, people wonder about what might have beens, when WMF is changing branding to where movement was 10 years ago. WMF is showing its conservative approach meeting readers where they are, rather than shaping brand of where we want to go. And collecting money from large donors. We need some branding for where we want wikisource to go. Can we have some wikisource t-shirts with Indic languages on it? My vienna t-shirt is getting old. Cheers.
On Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 7:54 AM Tito Dutta trulytito@gmail.com wrote:
Greetings and good day,
What you have to ask yourself: If it had been named "Wikipedia
Foundation"
from the start, would you have left it?
– That's citing an imaginary situation while dealing with a real problem.
Thanks Tito Dutta
On Sun, 21 Jun 2020 at 03:44, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 2020-06-19 09:58, Nicolas VIGNERON wrote:
All three options remove the term "Wikimedia" to replace it by "Wikipedia" and indeed, there is no statu quo option...
In my opinion, it was a mistake in 2003, when the foundation was established, to invent a new name for it. If it had been called "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start, it would have been so much easier to explain to friends, collaboration partners and donors what we are. We are a foundation to support Wikipedia (and also its sister projects). Wikisource, Wiktionary and the rest are just that: They are sister projects to Wikipedia, always were, always have been.
Only Wikipedia is the groundbreaking innovation that could win the Nobel Prize (for peace, perhaps?). None of the sister projects could qualify for this. While Wikisource is great, we should be humble and grateful that we can benefit from all the money and technology around Wikipedia, including events like Wikimania.
What you have to ask yourself: If it had been named "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start, would you have left it? Would you have left Wikisource, in order to administrate your own, separate, independent project? Asaf Bartov does this with Project Ben-Yehuda. I do this with Project Runeberg. These are not part of Wikisource, not part of the Wikipedia/-media movement. But we never broke away from Wikisource. The reason we maintain our own projects is because they are older than Wikisource. It is a lot of extra work to administrate your own project. If this kind of extra administration is your mission in life, perhaps you should leave Wikisource and run your own? See how fun that is.
In my case, I could close down Project Runeberg and merge with Wikisource, if it weren't for some differences in licensing. Much of what I have digitized there can not fit in Wikisource. And so I continue to carry the extra burden of administrating my own project. But it's not because I hate the Wikipedia movement or Wikisource. On the contrary, I was active in establishing the Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2007. And I have spent too much time explaining the difference between Wikipedia and Wikimedia.
I wish it had been named "Wikipedia Foundation" from the start. When the burden of dual names was obvious in 2015, I wish the foundation had just renamed itself quickly without asking anyone. It would have been criticized, but now it is criticized anyway after very long and slow process, so no gain.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Linköping, Sweden
Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/
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