Hoi, At the time there were enough people who did not want a Wikipedia Foundation so it did not happen. People insisted for the Wikimedia Foundation to concentrate on Wikipedia and English Wikipedia at that and that is what happened. In a marketing driven organisation, there would be people specifically tasked with understanding, developing, optimising the other brands. It was the German chapter that developed and still develops Wikidata. Key parts are left to the Wikimedia Foundation; they are integration of Commons, hardware and performance search and marketing...
The assertion that all the other projects are there to support Wikipedia is not easy to explain. What is abundantly clear is that the existing bias for the support of English means that the market for English is largely saturated. We are at a point where Wikidata is at a point where it overtakes English Wikipedia in supporting the other projects.
* Commons is now searchable *in any language* thanks to Special:MediaSearch [1]. It just takes further development and marketing to make Commons bigger than many of the commercial alternatives because of this. * Scholia needs internationalisation and localisation. Having said that, it already points to later papers for what you find in the reference section of many/most articles. It follows that what was a NPOV at a time is no longer neutral. Increasingly Scholia templates find their way on English Wikipedia articles.That is how it "serves" Wikipedia * Scholia is increasingly used by scientists in their professional capacity. The demand for Wikidata increases autonomously as a result. * Given that Wikidata knows about Wikisource, it could know about the status of Wikisource books et al. This provides a basis to market the finished product to an audience that would exponentially grow. * This is not exhaustive
The point is that Wikimedia Foundation needs to market to realise its goal; share in the sum of all knowledge. That is what it is there for and has written a 2030 strategy for. It should not be beholden to Wikipedia or anyone. Thanks, GerardM
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch?type=bitmap&q=%D8...
On Sun, 21 Jun 2020 at 00:14, 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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