
Leading with Wikipedia: A brand proposal for 2030 - The_ed17
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/02/26/leading-with-wikipedia-a-brand-proposal-for-2030/
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spac
Contrarily to the negative sentiment expressed so far in the comments, I find
branding an important question:

If a foundation does good work, you’d want the foundation to receive more
money to do more good work.

For example, Wikipedia would benefit from many more tech investments, for
example in the excellent wiki data and wikimedia research initiatives; or
think of wiki vandalism and fake news.

It’s well known in the non-profit world (and intuitive) that spending money in
marketing does indeed help achieve larger goals in terms of deployed funding.

Beyond funding, the fact that people (hacker news is not a representative
sample) don’t recognize Wikimedia and the fact that it’s responsible for
something that is used daily is a problem. It detracts from the project and
removes visibility.

Edit: made it more readable

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51lver
I would much prefer them to stay small, tight, and focused.

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mercer
If only the Mozilla Foundation had a similar preference...

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atdt
I spent over four years as an engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, which
trained me to expect the double-take most people do when they hear the name
for the first time. They either think they misheard you, or worse: they think
you represent a knock-off entity that is trading on a misleading brand
similarity, and they squint at you with suspicion. It's as if you told them
you work at "AmaZone". So you can immediately forget about any bragging
rights. The conversation has barely started and you are already at a trust
deficit.

It's almost worse when the other party has heard of Wikimedia, because then
your (by-now rehearsed) introduction comes across as wooden and weirdly
defensive.

And if you think all that is bad... the annual conference for the Wikimedia
community is called _Wikimania_. Try explaining _that_ to passport control.

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uranusjr
I have a friend working at Canonical, and whenever he introduces himself he
always includes a brief mention that Canonical makes Ubuntu. I felt it’s very
strange (and certainly felt it a little offensive when I first knew him), but
came to understand it after a while. It is _not_ common for people to make
connection between Canonical and Ubuntu (even IT people!). He needs to
establish himself, otherwise many people won’t take him seriously when he
talks about Linux stuff. It’s quite unfortunate.

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scoutt
I wonder if someone working at Alphabet Inc. suffers the same anonymity.

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majewsky
Alphabet is only a holding. I wouldn't expect many people to work for Alphabet
directly.

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currymj
What is the appeal of getting them to cut costs down to nothing? It seems
weird to me that people resent a budget of $70 million/year for the most
useful website in existence. What would you rather the money be spent on?

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hug
The problem, in all this, is not getting _Wikipedia_ 's expenses down to
nothing. I use Wikipedia all the time, and I love it. It's an incredibly
useful site and should be funded well enough to keep running indefinitely, and
even have room for improvement.

On the other hand, if I choose to donate money to Wikmedia, 80% of it goes to
other places, like their "content" sites, which consists of this bunch of
mediocrity:

Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons,
Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, and Wikidata.

I don't give a shit about any of these projects, the only one I _really_ don't
want to go away is Wikipedia, and the rest could die and I wouldn't even
blink, except as those projects also support Wikipedia. Increase Wikipedia's
expenses if you must! Double it! Triple it! Just don't pretend that the
foundation is struggling to support the thing that most people donating
actually care about.

~~~
DC-3
Anecdote warning - I have been studying Old English this year and have found
Wiktionary invaluable.

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hug
I think it's great that Wiktionary is a good resource for you!

Hearing things like this only makes me with _more_ that people could donate to
individual projects and not the WMF at large.

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c0l0
The thing that depresses me the most about Wiki[mp]edia is that the US$ 100
that I donated to them a few years ago (presumably,) predominantly went into
creating material like this.

Given how incredibly well-funded Wikimedia is, their yearly extort^Wdonation-
drive with 50%+ viewport-sized banners plastered all over Wikipedia, claiming
that the encyclopedia you're viewing is in dire need of your money to barely
sustain itself for the rest of the year, actually makes me rather angry every
time I see it.

Recommended reading for those unaware of how (and what) Wikimedia is actually
doing:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-
ed)

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omouse
They're only well-funded for now. That funding can go away if enough people,
such as yourself, complain about this. They need to sustain themselves, just
like any other organization. If they are a net negative in the world, I would
withhold donations. For producing material like this? It's still a net
positive and therefore still worthy of donating to.

~~~
Geimfari
The foundation has so much money that they could fully sustain themselves just
from their endowment if they wanted to. They really do not need donations from
the public and their petitions for money are misleading for the majority of
people, who think they are helping to pay for editors (free) and server costs
(minor costs).

~~~
adventured
They have enough cash to safely operate for one year roughly with current
expenses, without new contributions. I'm not sure where you're getting that
they can free-stand just on their foundation's financial position.

Expenses were $81.4 million in 2018 (up from $69m in 2017). Cash is $73.9m (up
from $49.5m). Wages were $38.5m.

Here is their audited 2017-2018 financial report [PDF]:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-18_-_Independent_Auditors%27_Report.pdf)

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Wowfunhappy
Wikipedia is well known _as an encyclopedia_.

Changing that name to encompass a project which is quite different will be
detrimental.

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evandev
They are talking about changing the company's name behind Wikipedia to have
the same name as the product.

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zapzupnz
Indeed, no more different than the company Google having the search engine
also called Google. (yes, I know it's technically called Google Search, but
no, for all practical uses, it isn't)

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microcolonel
> _while shortening “Wikimedia Commons” to its nickname “Wikicommons”_

Literally never seen anyone write "Wikicommons", in all the years I've heard
people talk about Commons, but heh.

I don't really understand how they manage to (in my opinion) waste time on
nonsense like this. The services run great, the contribution volume is
immense, and the quality of the tools is improving constantly. I want the
Wikimedia Foundation's treasury to keep more funds to deal with conditions
which may arise, and seek donations when they expect the most success (rather
than the most desperation).

I want the Wikimedia Foundation to make it as attractive and convenient as
possible for all interested persons to contribute to, and access, this immense
cultural resource, but basically nothing else; and I just don't see how
messing about with the names is an efficient way to carry out that job.

~~~
morpheuskafka
If this were to go through, they should just make WC be called "Wikimedia."
Wikipedia is a wiki encyclopedia, Wikimedia should be a wiki of media. What is
a wiki of a commons?

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shawnz
So you're suggesting reusing a brand they've already used in the past except
with a totally different meaning? And that will be less confusing?

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microcolonel
I think morpheuskafka is saying that if they are going to reuse a brand, as is
already proposed, they might as well use the least confusing and silly short
name for wikimedia commons he can think of.

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51lver
I get the distinct feeling this is from some busy body with too much free time
looking to make an impact...

Change for change's sake is bad. Think of the tech debt.

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YjSe2GMQ
This is essentially about cleaning up debt (though brand debt, rather than
technical). Read atdt's comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259543)

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d33
By the way, I feel like I should underline that I consider the technology
behind Wikimedia a nice idea, but terrible execution. Apart from it being
completely not standardized and having only one implementation, just compare
it to Stack Overflow: both have the goal of gathering valuable knowledge and
one manages to use gamification to build a healthy and transparent community,
while the other has the least intuitive system possible, based on "voting" by
editing Wikipedia pages only to end up being reminded that this is not a
democracy. I feel that if the process was easier to grasp, people would edit
more and we would have even more access to knowledge. Also, not integrating
with Wikias sounds like a lost opportunity as well. I know that they vary by
scope, but this would better solve the problem of deletionism vs inclusionism
than what we have right now - criteria of "notability" in order to... reduce
noise? Reduce maintenance cost? Neither is convincing to me.

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dependsontheq
This is a very nice brand research project, based on this they obviously had
problems. “Wikimedia is a Social Media Video site” is a quote from the
research.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Global_W...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Global_Wikipedia_and_Wikimedia_Brand_Research_Report.pdf)

~~~
titanix2
How much researchers should they hire to understand writing everything in blue
is ugly? You can create and maintain a brand image without going ridiculous
like that.

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largehotcoffee
This is a great idea! It's honestly long overdue

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Mizza
Okay. Makes sense to me.

Now what are you going to do about busybody deletionists with power driving
away every single new contributor - and most of the old ones?

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painful
This seems like a narrowly thought out proposal. Contrary to what Wikimedia
may think and see today, Wikipedia is not the future. The future is something
closer to robotopedia or machinepedia or autowikipedia, if you get what I'm
saying. The name Wikimedia is fine.

I have seen the future, and there is no place for human writers in it.

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untog
> The future is something closer to robotopedia or machinepedia, if you get
> what I'm saying

Can't disagree with that enough. Wikipedia owes its incredible quality to the
human editors doing thankless work behind the scenes. A machine-driven
alternative would be awful.

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vokep
As long as machine writing is below human level quality, yes.

But that won't be the case for too many more years.

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untog
I'm not convinced of that. It feels very much like self driving cars: people
look back 5 years, see X amount of progress, and assume that at least X amount
more will be done 5 years from now. Reality rarely tracks that way.

