[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Brand Survey Analysis

[Anthony]

On 7/5/07, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/5/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 7/5/07, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
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>
> <snip>
>
> I think it's equally foolish to pretend that the people who think that
> > Wikipedia = Wikimedia are correct.  Wikipedia is a much more valuable
> > name than Wikimedia because Wikipedia is a much bigger success than
> > Wikimedia.
>
>
> I'm not sure "success" is the right way of looking at it. Off the top of
> your head, what are Marlboro Reds? Now, what does Altria Corporation do for
> a living?
>
> You may have heard of Miller Light and Pilsner Urquell. But what about
> SABMiller?
>
> What about our friends at World Book? Who's their holding company, again?
> Oh, hmm, Berkshire Hathaway.
>
> I'm not suggesting that Wikimedia should strive to be anything like one of
> these megacorporations. But brand recognition doesn't *necessarily* reflect
> corporate success -- not if Wikimedia's main goal is to quietly keep its
> very famous products, the projects, afloat.
>
You're right that brand recognition doesn't necessarily reflect
corporate success, but *in this case* I think it does.  Wikipedia is
an incredibly unique situation which doesn't really fit into any
analogies I can think of.  Wikipedia is a project which grew out of a
volunteer effort facilitated by a for-profit and rolled over into a
non-profit.  I can't really think of any other situation for that
alone.  Mozilla/Netscape fits most of that, but Netscape wasn't built
by volunteers.

I also think you unintentionally make the point that it's not
important for a company to be named after its most popular brand name.

(By the way, I did know what Altria and Berkshire Hathaway are,
although for Berkshire I would have thought of "insurance" and didn't
know they happened to own World Book.)

> Or maybe I'm just jaded because I spent an hour last night talking to a
> friend who wanted to know how he could get his online community of
> historical reenactors joined up with "Wiki"; he meant Wikipedia, and he just
> assumed that we had a good way to incorporate specific communities of
> interest. This is a sysadmin with his own install of Mediawiki, so not
> entirely clueless. But I suspect, as others have pointed out in this thread,
> that community distinctions elide most of the public once they've gotten the
> idea of 'wiki' anything.
>
> -- phoebe