Wikisource:News/2019-04/Wikisource faces potential rebranding
Wikisource — A Wikipedia project
[edit]This story is a republication of "Wikipedia — A Wikipedia project" which originally ran in the the Wikipedia Signpost. It has only been edited to fix internal links, and the original story with complete attribution can be found here.
The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a community consultation on the Wikimedia/Wikipedia brand. In particular, the rebranding project proposes:
- Using Wikipedia as the central movement brand rather than Wikimedia.
- Providing clearer connections to the sister projects from Wikipedia to drive increased awareness, usage and contributions to all movement projects.
- Retaining Wikimedia project names, with the exception of Wikimedia Commons which is recommended to be shortened to Wikicommons to be consistent with other projects.
- Exploring new naming conventions for the Foundation and affiliate groups to use Wikipedia rather than Wikimedia.
- Considering expository taglines and other naming conventions to reassert the connections between projects (e.g. “______ — A Wikipedia project”).
So far, most people in the discussion object to usurping the Wikipedia brand (a portmanteau of wiki + encyclopedia) and plastering it over projects which are not encyclopedias, like wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki + dictionary), creating a weird Wiktionary, a Wikipedia project tagline, when Wiktionary is not an encyclopedia, and Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Other projects also feel that they have strong identities of their own, such as Wikinews, which is not affiliated with Wikipedia. Broad consensus is that rebranding other Wikimedia projects as "Wikipedia projects" is both inaccurate, and creates more confusion than it solves.
Other aspects of the rebranding efforts are less opposed, with several suggestions aiming to establish more effective brands for Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, the Wikimedia Foundation, and MediaWiki.