[Foundation-l] Designs and other fundraiser updates

[Robert Rohde]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:50 AM, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> 1) The slogan "Wikipedia is a non-profit" sounds weird to me.
> Technically, Wikipedia is not "'a" non-profit (which in my English as
> a second language view of the world, means organisations) . However,
> Wikipedia is non-profi, ie. the project is not meant for profit.
>
> Maybe that doesn't work in English, I don't know. I suppose that the
> site notice is going to be translated, so maybe make sure that the
> translation makes sense rather than reflects the English text. Also,
> in many languages (well, at least in French) non-profit is a huge set
> of words. We might want to "localize" the slogans rather than just
> "translate them".
<snip>

It is not just you Delphine.  As a native speaker "Wikipedia is a
non-profit" sounds weird to me too.  I know what is meant by it,
obviously, but generally speaking "non-profit" as a noun does mean an
organization, while Wikipedia isn't an organization; it is an
encyclopedia.

"Wikimedia is a non-profit" would of course work grammatically, but
Wikimedia lacks comparable name recognition.

"Wikipedia is a non-profit encyclopedia" or "Wikipedia is a non-profit
project" can work with "non-profit" used as an adjective rather than a
noun.

-Robert Rohde