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

[Erik Moeller]

Ant-

> I think the issue is NOT entirely the one of "confusion". But also an 
> aspect of image, self-image.
>
> When we use explicitely the word "foundation", we transmit a certain 
> message to the reader.

Well, we do explicitly use that word on the website. Do we have to use 
it in the domain name? Let's look at some foundations Google gives us:

Rockefeller Foundation - rockfound.org
Ford Foundation - fordfound.org
Heritage Foundation - heritage.org
Apache Software Foundation - apache.org
Free Software Foundation - fsf.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation - eff.org
Arthritis Foundation - arthritis.org
Kellogg Foundation - wkkf.org
Open Societiy Institute - soros.org
Benton Foundation - benton.org
Global SchoolNet Foundation - globalschoolnet.org
MacArthur Foundation - macfound.org
Hewlett Foundation - hewlett.org
Packard Foundation - packard.org
Andrew Mellon Foundation - mellon.org
Carnegie Corporation - carnegie.org
Templeton Foundation - templeton.org
....


Most large, successful foundations have one thing in common: short 
domain names. Besides the ones listed, many have haphazardly constructed 
three- or four-letter acronyms, and some major ones even use the ugly 
shorthand "found" as a disambiguation instead of the longer 
"foundation". Whenever possible, foundations seem to use the word.org 
form. Make no mistake, there's plenty of foundations with "foundation" 
in the URL, but for the cases I could come up with, this is because a 
shorter name was not available (e.g. gates.org is taken by some guy's 
mail server). I haven't found a single one which redirects a short name 
to a longer one.

Having a short domain name is very important. Many people don't use 
bookmarks, and they will visit a site only if they feel like typing the 
name. wikimediafoundation.org is 23 characters, longer than every single 
name on the Alexa top 100 websites list. Conveying the message that we 
are a foundation is best left to the website content, in my opinion, 
rather than the domain name. I don't see emphasis as a sufficient reason 
to keep a long name, otherwise we might as well call it 
wikimedianonprofit.org or wikimediafreeknowledge.org to emphasize other 
aspects of importance.

Regards,

Erik