[Foundation-l] Wikiversity=>Wikisophia

[Lee Daniel Crocker]

On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 04:52 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Of course we're not going to install WikiTeX if we decide that there's a 
> better option, but that seems unlikely. WikiTeX is one of the most 
> requested features from our users. 

Just because users demand something, that doesn't mean it's really
what they need.  Part of the job of good software design is filtering
user input to determine what the user's problem really is, and finding
the best way to solve that problem regardless of what the user thinks
is the right solution.

I like WikiTeX, and the formal wiki syntax I'm working on has a nearly
identical extension-based syntax for the kinds of things it does.

It might be a good idea to, say, promise to devote some resources to do
a security review and make WikiTeX part of the mediawiki software on
SourceForge that other wikis install, but not commit to installing it
ourselves until we do more work on performance as well.

> Wikimedia is not an English language project, for starters. This makes 
> it necessary for English language derived names like Wiktionary to be 
> localized, which then leads to confusion when you go to a domain like 
> pl.wiktionary.org and end up on a site called Wikisłownik. Of course, to 
> a certain extent, you will never be able to avoid this, but at least in 
> the Latin languages, you can strive for a name which doesn't require 
> localization. Wiktionary is not too bad because it's still a neologism, 
> whereas something like "Wikimedia Dictionary" would be much worse.

I don't see that at all--plain words translate into plain words
directly: "Dictionnaire Wikipédia", "Wikipedia Słownik", etc.
Trying to find a latin-based neologism or something doesn't avoid
the problem of translation, it just warps it a bit.

> A short and unique name is also useful for searching the project and 
> marketing it...
> FWIW, the "cute" part of "Wikisophia" is not "-sophia", but "Wiki", and 
> we're pretty much stuck with that no matter what we do.

Fair enough.  "Wikisophia" is a fine name, and might not have to be
translated in some languages (though Bulgarians might think it's just
a local chapter or something :-).  I just don't think a serious
academic project should fall into the habit of marketing-speak, even
if it would be effective (which is far from given).

-- 
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>