[Foundation-l] Re: Progress on wikimedia.com?

[Erik Moeller]

Anthere-

> Actually, the more time goes by, the happier I am with the full name
> Many people get confused between wikipedia, wikimedia and mediawiki
> We certainly  need wikimedia.com, but I am not so convinced we should 
> move the site to wikimedia.org.


Is it actually true that wikimediafoundation.org reduces the confusion, 
though? One could argue that it increases it. Compare:

wikipedia.org
wikimediafoundation.org

wikipedia.org
wikimedia.org

In the first case, there are two differences - the "foundation" suffix 
and the "m" instead of the "p". In the second case, the only difference 
is the "m"/"p" difference.

If I give someone the wikimediafoundation.org URL, and they visit it, 
chances are, they only notice the big difference - the "foundation" - 
and do not notice the smaller one. They might remember it as the 
"Wikipedia Foundation". A Google search for "Wikipedia Foundation" turns 
up 887 hits, so we can take this to be a common mistake. The reality may 
be somewhat counterintuitive: reducing the name to wikimedia.org makes 
the small difference more apparent -- leading to the intuition that it 
is "more confusing", when actually it highlights the difference and 
thereby reduces the confusion.

Now, there are cases of confusion that will happen between wikipedia.org 
/ wikimedia.org -- but if we redirect wikimedia.org to 
wikimediafoundation.org anyway, what positive difference does the 
"-foundation" make? Tell people that they are in the right or wrong 
place? That's what the content of the website should accomplish. This 
could be done very tastefully with a nice, prominent icon box both on 
the wikipedia.org and wikimedia.org homepages.

I also think that using wikimedia.org would be more consistent with its 
use in our projects such as commons.wikimedia.org, meta.wikimedia.org, 
foundation-l at wikimedia.org, etc.. wikimediafoundation.org vs. 
wikimedia.org suggests that there's a difference when they're one and 
the same. Again, this may add to the confusion rather than reducing it, 
because we have two domain names in active use.

I don't think the confusion can be reduced by simply using a longer name 
-- I believe the only way to accomplish that would be to change the main 
component, the "Wikimedia", but that doesn't seem practical. What are 
the cases where the confusion would increase if we move the site to 
wikimedia.org?

Regards,

Erik