Community open letter against renaming Wikimedia to Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Community open letter against renaming Wikimedia to Wikipedia

meta.wikimedia.org

126 pointsbpierre37 comments

Oh, it's one of those "if it ain't broken, ruin it by rebranding" moves that we've seen play out so many times, is it?

Great thinking. People know that Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia, it's in the name. Let's make it stand for many things that are not the encyclopedia.

If there was a Wikipedia article about it... Oh wait, there is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand#Brand_extension_and_bran...

They are accepting comments at brandproject@wikimedia.org

Here is what I sent them, if anyone wants to follow:

----------------------------

Hello,

I am writing to you regarding the rebranding proposal to use Wikipedia for projects that are not Wikipedia.

In short: please don't. This is a plain example of brand dilution.

The brand has a clear meaning: Wikipedia stands for an encyclopedia. The trust and widespread acceptance of the brand comes from this clear association. Wikipedia doesn't stand for the news. Or for the books. Or for pictures. Or for media.

Wikipedia stands for an encyclopedia, which is valued as a source of knowledge, and is held to standards and format that other Wikimedia projects don't have to follow. A "Wikipedia article" is an encyclopedia article. It's not a news piece, not a book, not a picture, not a data set, not a dictionary definition, nor any of the other things that Wikimedia projects attain.

By making Wikipedia an umbrella brand for all of those, you kill the brand, plain and simple.

Please value the efforts of all people who made these projects possible, and keep Wikipedia Wikipedia.

Sincerely,

---------------------------

Another option is using the talk page [1].

If you also think that Wikipedia should only stand for the encyclopedia, make your voice heard by either of the means.

[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Communications/Wikimedi...

Seems like the discussion is marked closed.

Ongoing discussion here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Communications/Wikimedi...

There is also an RfC on the matter with a majority of voting editors opposing the change proposed.[1]

Considering that the WMF has allocated $800k for rebranding efforts for this year,[2] and has already signed a contract with Snøhetta,[3][4] all with no consent from the community, I wonder how willing they would be to walk back on their position.

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Requests_... section "Comments"

2. Ibid, image/PDF in the section "Joint strong opposition to the branding process from the Catalan Wikimedia projects & Amical Wikimedia (WMCAT)"

3. https://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/i/mRd1pp/snoehetta-skal-sk... (in Norwegian)

4. https://brandingwikipedia.org/

This is Wikimedia changing to the name that a majority of people know it from, this is not them going from Netflix to Quikster.

If I tell my mom to look up something on Wiktionary, I don't tell her it's the same group as Wikimedia, I tell her it's part of Wikipedia, even though the former is correct and the latter is not. In her mind, and in the minds of practically everyone outside of tech, Wikimedia is Wikipedia.

> If I tell my mom to look up something on Wiktionary, I don't tell her it's the same group as Wikimedia, I tell her it's part of Wikipedia...

Why say either? Not only is it untrue and misleading, but it is entirely pointless, far as I can tell. Does anyone except a certain type of contributor, or staff, care that Wikimedia is an organization?

Conversely, is anyone going to pay enough attention to understand the subtleties of "Wikipedia Encyclopedia" where "Wikipedia Dictionary" is somehow not part of an encyclopedia?

Having multiple great other projects with little recognition (or much less public awareness) than Wikipedia must be challenging, and for all of us, readers, unfortunate. Projects like Wikidata (basis for all knowledge graphs powering search engines), Wikinews (what could potentially be fact checked news in an age of misinformation), etc could all benefit from some raised awareness for all Wikimedia projects. Even raising money from donations, is usually targeted at Wikipedia. I do not how the governance structure of Wikimedia influences the distribution of donations, or whether renaming is meant to influence this. Overall, I see a sincere struggle to get traction around more Wikimedia projects - and I find that commendable.

Counterpoint: a "Wikipedia article" has a worldwide recognition and trust precisely because it does not stand for a news article.

If you rebrand Wikinews to being a part of Wikipedia, the value of a "Wikipedia article" goes down, since there is less distinction between the two.

You might raise awareness. You might also kill the brand, and the project.

There are other ways of raising awareness than by rebranding.

>a "Wikipedia article" has a worldwide recognition and trust

For the average person, Wikipedia exists as a mix of trust and distrust, with its distrustful image preceding it.

It still carries the reputation of something you cant cite in school, that anyone can edit. The name itself is thrown around as a pejorative, even by people who behind closed doors consume it.

This is also a surprisingly hard claim to google, for sources. "wikipedia used as a pejorative -site:wikipedia.org -site:wiktionary.org -site:wikipedia.nd.ax" etc returns nothing I want.

Perhaps it's a surprisingly hard claim to google because it's not something that happens often? :)

I personally don't know anyone who would use it that way. Yes, people are aware that articles on controversial topics can fluctuate, but generally, people love using Wikipedia as a starting point of finding out about things.

When someone wants to find out about West Indian Manatee, they don't go to Britannica.

For some things, maybe. But it seems that more often than not, the Wikipedia article is just a jumble of incomprehensible technical terms and mathematical formulae, and I end up looking elsewhere. At least for anything remotely technical.

For example, Fitts's Law[1], which is a super simple concept that the further away a target is, the bigger it needs to be to quickly and accurately reach it. It's super relevant in any sort of graphical user interface design, particularly mouse-driven ones, and you don't need to know the math behind it to understand it. But this is how Wikipedia introduces it:

> Fitts's law is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics. This scientific law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target.

And it jumps right into a bunch of complicated-looking math from there. If you're not already familiar with the topic and you're also not a mathematician, the whole thing is complete gibberish.

That was only the first topic I thought of, and I've never seen that particular page before.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

It's hard for me to see anything bad with this article, but I am a mathematician :)

I agree that there are problems with Wikipedia getting too technical and dry, but that's kind of expected of an encyclopedia.

Still, there is a consistent expectation, even if it's "technical mumbo jumbo".

It's very different from whatever other Wikimedia projects offer. And that's the problem.

It reads like a research paper, that's why it's bad. It could start off something along my description of the topic in layman's terms before getting into the technical details which are often not relevant.

Wikipedia is a general purpose encyclopedia, not directed towards any particular group of people. But many articles are written towards people that are highly-educated in the field the topic is in, which kind of misses the point.

What is preventing you from improving the article?

Nothing, except there's no reason for me to do so, improving every bad Wikipedia article I come across would be a full-time job, my edit would probably get reverted by some other overzealous editor who thinks he owns the article, and I can't say that I know very much about most Wikipedia articles I look at (because if I did I wouldn't be looking at them).

That last one might be part of the problem: the only people who edit those kind of Wiki articles are subject experts with some external motivation for doing so.

Improving an article from time to time is a lot more helpful than complaining about it.

I think we need more levels of Wikipedia. Simple.wikipedia is quite useful for simple explanations, but often it's not really what you're looking for. I know a large number of science-related articles in various disciplines are overly technical--maybe we need a new technical.wikipedia for more technical versions of articles with formulas and equations instead of descriptions. Or maybe use namespaces instead would work better, though then you'd have to decide how to match with the talk: namespace.

>Yes, people are aware that articles on controversial topics can fluctuate

From the perspective of my comment, youve already drifted too far into the population who know too much about the inner workings and trends of the site. A person saying "whered you read that, wikipedia" probably wouldnt know about site controversies, or specific biases.

I see no inherent problem of confusion if this is well managed. Coca-cola has Coke Zero and Dasani in their family of products. Yet nobody confuses Dasani for Coke. Nobody even confuses Coke Zero for Coke. Sometimes it makes sense to have a strong association with the "flagship" brand and sometimes not.

Also, I suggest that maybe one should think about branding from the perspective of a naive user. Is it true that there is a well-understood distinction between Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikinews? I think not. We can't even get people to understand that Wikileaks isn't associated with Wikipedia. For the general public, if it has "wiki" in the front it's Wikipedia.

Given that, the main problem is using words that are almost, but not quite, Wikipedia. If you work at the Foundation, and have to explain what you do to anyone else, it's pretty annoying. I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation on MediaWiki software on a project primarily for Wikimedia Commons which is a backend for Wikipedia. It sounds like you're just doing permutation rounds of several syllables.

I'm not sure what the argument is about, other than the various wikiprojects' disdain for each other and the Foundation itself. Which I admit is sometimes earned, in every direction. The WMF isn't always the best partner. The standards for some wikiprojects are abysmal and for some they are quite high.

But when you get right down to it, that's true of all the language variants of Wikipedia too, and they literally do share the exact same name. Has that been a problem as well?

This seems reminiscent of Mozilla’s decision to rebrand “Firefox” as “Firefox browser” and put it together with their other products under the parent brand “Firefox.”

https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/files/2019/06/FX_Design_...

I thought this was a poor move. Everyone know Firefox as a browser. The other products which got included under the Firefox umbrella are just unoriginal browser extensions. If they came out with another, non-browser related product, it ought to be under the Mozilla brand.

The fact that I had no prior knowledge of this shows just how useful their exercise in rebranding was. Firefox is a browser. Saying “Firefox browser” is mere tautology.

> The outreach and feedback KPIs were satisfied. The consultation was shared to 122 affiliates, of which 52 responded. While it's impossible to accurately measure the number of community members that were contacted, the consultation was presented on email lists and web pages with thousands of readers, and 144 community members replied. > A key performance indicator was that over 20% of affiliates support this change, and that was met, with 38% of the 63 affiliates that responded supporting the change, and 10% opposing. > There were two KPIs that measured community support, which required less than 20% of the community oppose the change, and over 20% support it. Neither performance indicator was met, as 40% of the community opposed the change and 14% supported it. From: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_bra...

Does <40% of respondents, where most polled don’t care enough to respond, seem like an awfully small show of support to anyone else? And that’s on the metric which seems stronger.

It’s still three times more than oppose it.

If most don’t care, there’s no reason to lump them in with the opposition.

I just don't get it either way. Why bother?

I‘m pretty active on Wikidata and don’t have a problem with this.

People here are arguing to stick with Wikimedia for reasons that are logically and ontologically flawless, but do not in the least matter for the purposes of branding.

When the foundation calls a politician only vaguely familiar with the internet, they will still know Wikipedia, and might be more willing to do whatever it is the foundation wants. The same is true for almost anyone except maybe their most active users.

Community opposition, even though I disagree with it, is the only valid reason not to do this. I can’t really tell how represent this letter is for the community, many of whom are likely to be at least indifferent to it. But the foundation will have a better idea and certainly consider it.

Can we get a little bit of a title change on this? It seemed at first glance like this was people asking to rename Wikimedia into Wikipedia. Instead it's a community letter asking to cease renaming Wikimedia into Wikipedia.

Can the title be changed to something like "Community open letter on ceasing renaming Wikimedia to Wikipedia" ?

That’s better indeed, thanks!

"Ceasing renaming" seems awkward so I reworded it. If someone suggests a better wording we can change it again.

Stop renaming Wikimedia to Wikipedia, says community open letter

The Ce of cease rhymes with Re and Wi, making it awkward.

Your wording is better than the letter's, from which I couldn't tell which way they were proposing to go.

I didn’t know they were doing this but I agree with the sentiment of the letter. It’s no different than any other social technologies... the community builds it then the company co-opts it (and usually monetizes it AND the quality degrades).

I found the News section of this article helpful in understanding the context. See the recent board and execute statements. https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Wikimedia_b...

There seems to be a gap between board and executive team as to whether a rebrand has been decided.

The encyclopedia seems to have been written, the mediawiki engine is working fine, so now they either have to rebrand, or work on a dark theme.

Dark times indeed.

This reminds me of when 37Signals rebranded to Basecamp. Except at the same time they dropped all other projects until now with the release of HEY.

Tandy started circling the drain when it renamed itself to RadioShack.

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