Proposal talk:Brand name consolidation

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I think it would be interesting to split this proposal up a bit:

  • A general proposal for Brand Name consolidation
  • A proposal for renaming the current projects into namespaces
  • The TLD proposal

That way, other people can more easily add sub proposals. Lodewijk 10:55, 18 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A positive and constructive idea, Lodewijk. The proposal has been amended. Dedalus 21:35, 18 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why al this Marketing-thoughts

We dont need to appear as a brand. We dont need to market a product. Integrating Wikiversity or Wikiquotations into Wikipedia is not the best idea. --90.146.217.210 21:02, 18 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is a globally recognized brand name, and one of the most valuable ones. Wikpedia is a product. Given the current situation one of the main strategic challenges is to reach out to new people. They might have heard of Wikipedia, but haven't visited a project website yet to read or contribute. An effective and efficient publicity effort is needed to get our message across to people who might have of Wikipedia and to some who haven't heard at all about Wikipedia. And why all this marketing thoughts? You're welcome to submit your proposal in this strategic planning process. And, uhm, strategic planning is for a big part as starters marketing. Why we do it? Quite a lot of people want to perpetuate the projects - so we need to keep them vibrantly a life. Dedalus 21:27, 18 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
How about each Wikipedia article has a section in it for Inter-Wiki links to other Wiki sites for more information on the subject the Wikipedia article is about? For example the Wikipedia Java article would have Inter-Wiki links to the Wikibooks on Java or Wikiversity Courses on Java if the reader/user wanted to learn more about it. No need to put material from Wikibooks and Wikiversity into Wikipedia, that would be insane, just link to the other Wikis for more info and call the section the Inter-Wiki section and keep it separate from the Links section. You could also create a template for Inter-Wiki links to make them stand out in the article from the plain External Links section. Orion Blastar 03:28, 25 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. We need consolidated branding. The domains and functionality between all of them is too confusing. --Danlev 05:08, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Nonsense

Things like this prove that sister projects have their own target. Moreover, they have different technical and configuration issues which make this proposal simply unfeasable. Nemo 18:30, 19 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thats a nonsense.--Juan de Vojníkov 07:23, 1 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This has absolutelly nothing to do with the sisters project functionalities and missions, this is purely marketing stuff. So I do not know what you are talking about...--Kozuch 06:30, 12 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Complicated and Unnecessary

I agree with Nemo. This proposal is not at all high priority and certainly isn't worth the trouble. This won't 'help with advertising' to any degree- people who 'know us as WIkipedia' visit the Wikipedia site to find encyclopedic articles. Putting all of Wikimedia's projects under the Wikipedia name would confuse those users, not enlighten them.

Indeed it is complicated and unnecessary to have a great and well known website Wikipedia and calling the organization in support of it the Wikimedia Foundation - journalists tend to love to spell Wikimedia Foundation as Wikipedia Foundation in attempt not to confuse their readers. So it is indeed necessary and straight forward to rename the Foundation. Nemo mentions the merit of a specific other project. The proposal recognizes the merit of other projects - just have them as project namespaces within Wikipedia. The problem is not reaching out to people who 'know us as Wikipedia'. The problem is reaching out to people who have never heard of Wikipedia and/or never have visited a Wikipedia website. But I'll do best to find the proposals by Nemo and you for extending reach. Have you got any suggestions where to look? Dedalus 13:10, 21 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to understand because it is simply impossible to integrate other projects in Wikipedia (proposal which therefore doesn't worry me), give a look at Special:Version on different projects, to start with. Nemo 10:02, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It won't be really easy, but it won't be impossible. Of course you can stich with the status quo of communicating "Wikipedia and other projects", effectively marginalizing all 'other projects'. Dedalus 10:17, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I agree keep the Encyclopedia articles at Wikipedia and just use Inter-Wiki links to the various WikiMedia projects. It does not matter what the name of the organization is, as people will still go to wikipedia.org for encyclopedia articles, wikibooks.org for Wikibooks, etc. Wikimedia Foundation could be renamed later to something else, like WikiKnowledge, WikiUniverse, or even WikiCollaboration or maybe something "cool" sounding like FutureMedia or Knowledgeverse? Orion Blastar 03:24, 25 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • And I suppose you're going to have namespace-specific administrators, bureaucrats, and so on. No? Are you going to moderate the out-of-pram toy throwing associated with everyone having to share a main page? This is a recipe for chaos and considerable acrimony. Wikipedia became a household name without in-depth marketing analysis and all that. And from a technical standpoint this sounds like turning MediaWiki into a multi-headed monster that only SAP could love. --Brian McNeil 13:09, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

split into two proposals

there are actually two proposals here:

  1. rename "Wikimedia Foundation" to "Wikipedia Foundation"
  2. integrate all of the Wikimedia projects into Wikipedia

while i STRONGLY agree to the former, i am not so sure about the latter. this really is a MAJOR effort and has major costs and benefits that need to weighed and considered carefully. the former proposal, however, is (imho) mostly uncontroversial and will be (or so i think) approved by a vast majority of contributors. --80.142.147.131 16:19, 22 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support

I support the main idea of brand consolidation. However, it is not about brand only, it is about joining all the projects together to one huge project, because the projects overlap sometimes which only confuse users. For example, you can upload an "educational pdf" to Wikimedia Commons as well as to Wikisource. What is better in this case?--Kozuch 10:09, 30 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's obvious: Commons, because you can use it on every project, also Wikisource. Nemo 18:38, 12 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. --Danlev 05:05, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:06, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A correct brand consolidation would have huge impact on whole Wikimedia. I think this does not really need to be just about brand consolidation - the proposal most likely tries to make all Wikimedia projects more transparent. This could really be done with single branding while including all other projects undrer Wikipedia, because what actually matters is the license only and everything else is just technical matter. Ask people what is Wikipedia - they may know. Ask what is Wikisource - they definitelly will have no idea. If Wikisource would become "Wikipedia sources", Wikibooks "Wikipedia books", Commons "Wikipedia media" etc. that would be really intensive branding which would make the projects more transparent and would do great brand-oriented marketing at once.--Kozuch 15:15, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This will have a horrific impact on the communities working on smaller projects. Wikinews doesn't even use the same license as Wikipedia. The non-Wikipedia projects have developed their own ways of working and policy variations. This, predominantly, seems like an effort to steamroller all that - which will lose a lot of goodwill. --Brian McNeil 12:59, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Eric Moeller tried to propose it years ago and it was soundly rejected

Sometimes people fall into trap of forgetting that the communities are far more valuable than the few million buck (crucial as they are) they get from wikimedia doners. Putting marketing before the community is just backwards. Most projects are very different from the English (and other) wikipedia by nature and are run very differently.

And Wikipedia, being itself an encyclopaedia and hence a book, should find itself more comfortable sitting in a shelf in wikibooks, and not the other way round.

I suggest that the proposer link back to the original discussions on foundation-L and meta.

And if the brains in the wikimedia foundation find themselves hitting a doldrum in their pursuit of growth, they should consider that wikipedia may have reached the capacity of what MediaWiki can do and try to push for integration of technologies and multimedia. I have an idea of an idea for a potential future growth here: proposal:integrated learning experience. Since distance learning is a potentially huge market, I believe that if MediaWiki doesn't do it, someone else will. Hillgentleman 20:11, 12 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hill, you fail to sound like a gentleman. The core of the proposal puts people and hence community before anything else. It puts the people we haven't reached yet before anything else. The whole strategic planning process is about reach, participation and quality. What I've tried to do is to propose a way - which is not the only way, nor the only thing to do - a way to reach out to current non-participants and non-readers. To tell, and tell again that there is a valuable collection of works out there, which is directly available to them, and which they are free to use. And you are right that Wikipedia could be considered a book. However, "Wikipedia" is a globally recognized brand name, and "Wikibooks" isn't. As a movement we gain nothing by adding additional brand names next to the Wikipedia brand. And the primary idea is to attract more readers and more participants. The proposal is not about attracting more donors. The alternative to the proposal is closing "other projects" or moving them to Wikia or some other place. Maybe we can collaborate on finding a way to put our valuable collection of works to good use in distance learning. Dedalus 20:32, 12 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I am not amused by this particular section of your comment, "The alternative to the proposal is closing "other projects" or moving them to Wikia or some other place.". Why? If you're presupposing there is some cost-benefit aspect to this hair-brained proposal you're not making it clear. Why is it "Everything rolled all into Wikipedia" or "Kill all sister projects"? I'd truly hate to see Wikinews rolled into a News: namespace within Wikipedia, you'd be setting up the project's community to defend conventions and policies within a small enclave of the 300lb gorilla - it's a losing proposition. --Brian McNeil 13:17, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"Wikipedia" is a globally recognized brand name, but it is not necessarily respected in all quarters.
Other projects do not want to be slurped into the behemoth monster of Wikipedia, and would object violently to being placed under the administrative "care" of the sysops on Wikipedia.
The other projects will likely split away from the WMF if a merge goes ahead.
Why on earth is this a featured proposal? It was shot down a long time ago.
John Vandenberg 06:42, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Small projects other than Wikipedias

I think small projects other then Wikipedias (for example all "cs" projects expect Czech Wikipedia - wikibooks, wikisource, wikiversity etc.) struggle to exist and they do not bring a lot of positive to the readers community. Mostly it is very few complete articles in their best. I think this can be disappointing to the average reader as the projects are heavily promoted on local Wikipedias main pages and they simply do not deserve to get traffic from their "mother" encyclopedias. I would merge these projects to local Wikipedias. The reasons they still exists are various and mostly because some editors were "deprecated" in bigger projects so they went to smaller projects which they in some cases created themselves.--Kozuch 19:56, 17 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You have not contributed to these other projects, and yet you complain that they do not bring a lot of positive to the readers community.
The Wikisource project had 42 million pageviews in September 2009. You can see the statistics of how we are increasing the number of properly proofread pages. See wikisource:Special:IndexPages for a list of current projects on English Wikisource. Czech Wikisource has not installed this technology.
Wiktionary had 147 million pageviews in the same month.
These numbers are small in comparison to the 11,372 million pageviews that Wikipedia had in the same month, however they are not failing to attract readers. Compare wikisource.org with gutenberg.org. pgdp.net is not in the Alexa top 100,000.
John Vandenberg 06:25, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
You are not talking about small projects.--Kozuch 17:01, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Distinctions make a difference

Motivation #1 uses an incorrect premise in assuming that "To outsiders Wikimedia and Wikipedia are the same, as are other projects. ... Trying to explain the differences between Wikimedia and Wikipedia is nitpicking." [emphasis added] This is a red herring. The distinction between an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a compendium of quotations, etc. is not nitpicking, and the general public well understands the differences. Do not imagine that "the sum of all knowledge" fits within the scope and framework of an encyclopedia. It is a Good Thing™ that each project is a destination site serving a different purpose. The vision, or "movement" if you like, can attain greater reach with multiple offerings serving different applications than by limiting itself to a single monolithic one.

Regarding Key questions #1, I know several people who use Wiktionary and Wikiquote as reference materials in their professional capacities, and I know nobody who uses Wikipedia in such a way, although they are all aware that the projects are affiliated. These colleagues and acquaintances unanimously express the perception that reliability of information in the different projects is categorically different. Of course, a sample of my own acquaintances is only anecdotal, but I believe it represents a valid of outsider perception that raises an important question: Might not weakening or eliminating brand differentiation be detrimental to the more specialized projects? By way of analogy, one of the reasons that companies such as Procter & Gamble typically choose to bear "the burden of managing trademarks, brandnames," rather than market dishsoap and toothpaste under the same brand, is that the idea of putting dishsoap in one's mouth is, well, distasteful.

The way to increase the "visibility and recognition" of less prominent projects is to advertise and cross-promote them more heavily, rather than obscure their distinctiveness by subsuming them into the larger project and diluting its own popular brand. ~ Ningauble 17:05, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

April fools!

Seriously, this was an April fools joke on Wikibooks last year. I am torn between rage and insane laughter... Mike.lifeguard | @meta 02:14, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

English Wikibooks can't even be merged into English Wikipedia along the lines of this proposal, in that they have a Book: namespace already, competing with Wikibooks and killing the project's participation. The project is dying as it is due to a lack of community participation. And this isn't even well thought out. Wikibooks has Wikijunior and Cookbook namespaces, as well as its own project namespace. How would you handle this? Namespaces-within-namepaces? How about the fact that subpages are used extensively and countless technical functions are based on handling them?
  • Motivation #1 ("To outsiders Wikimedia and Wikipedia are the same ... To them it is all Wikipedia."): Is that it, or is it that some people believe only Wikipedia matters?
  • Motivation #2 (A .wikipedia TLD): The world doesn't revolve around Wikipedia and when *.wikipedia.org works just fine, I don't see the point.
  • Motivation #3 ("Navigating between projects becomes easier"): Stop forcing links to sister projects to the external links section at the absolute bottom of the article that nobody reads down to and it won't be so hard.
  • Motivation #4 ("Reintegration of commons into Wikipedia"): That completely disregards the fact that Commons doesn't permit fair use.
  • Motivation #5 ("Wikipedia dominates all other projects. Having the content of a specific project integrated into a specific namespace of Wikipedia would immediately increase its visibility and recognition."): The first point is obvious. The second point is the opposite of what would happen. Take 35,000 pages on the largest Wikibooks and throw them into a collection of 3 million articles on English Wikipedia and think about how their visibility would be affected as compared to being the primary content on a dedicated wiki.
This whole proposal focuses on outsider perception of Wikimedia/Wikipedia. How about you consider insider perception of Wikimedia, given that insiders are primarily responsible for production of content and maintenance of projects? – Adrignola 15:45, 30 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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