[Foundation-l] Rethinking brands

[Dmcdevit]

Kelly Martin wrote:
> Indeed, the proper response to the lower profile of the other projects
> is to advertise them more heavily, not to submerge them further.
>
>   
This may or may not be off topic, but one thing we are terrible at is 
cross-project community support. The submerged projects are largely our 
own doing. Mostly this is because most editors are (and I mean this 
factually, not disparagingly) wrapped up in their own work and project, 
and not necessarily connected to the wider Wikimedia mission or free 
content, and not well-acquainted with the other projects. From my 
perspective as a dual Wiktionarian and Wikipedian, I would say a huge 
proportion of Wikipedia articles that could have crossproject templates 
(i.e. {{wiktionary}}), which is most of the non-proper noun, non-phrase 
articles (100s K?) lack them. There is virtually no use of internal 
linking between the projects, even though it is [[wikt:easy|]], as easy 
as linking to another namespace. We should link all technical terms, and 
lists of terms, phrases, etc., from Wikipedia to Wiktionary instead; 
whereas now we have crappy stub articles or neverending terms lists on 
them, we could have more more useful dictionary articles, which affords 
etymologies, parts of speech, dictionary-style citations, audio 
pronunciations, and translations.

Unfortunately, all my attempts to do so so far have ironically met with 
people branding me a deletionist and vigorously defending their article 
on *their* project, with no concept of the parallel goals of projects 
like Wiktionary. People know Wiktionary is a wiki, but it's a foreign 
project to them. Transwiki should be a *process* not a deletion process, 
and instead of throwing things in the perceived trash heap of other 
projects, transwikied content should be integrated into Wikipedia 
articles. Wikipedia lends almost no manpower to helping with the cleanup 
of (massive amounts of) stuff transferred to Wiktionary, and 
consequently, it mostly languishes without entering the main namespace. 
This isn't all Wikipedia's fault: Wiktionary has never really made any 
internal effort to take on the transwiki process, and also lacks the 
equivalent {{wikipedia}} templates on most relevant articles, and 
furthermore, has increasingly been becoming more receptive of 
encyclopedic content. My suggestions to get rid of encyclopedic entries 
like placenames, brand names, names of TV shows, etc., have met with 
similar "inclusionist" resistance, when every failed search of those 
points the reader to the more useful Wikipedia article. ("Perhaps there 
is an article [[X]] in our sister encyclopedia project, Wikipedia.")

While I love the identities of both projects, we need to find a way to 
do that without making them foreign to each other, as that is a very bad 
way of promoting our long-term goals.

Dominic