Leading with Wikipedia: A brand proposal for 2030

Contrarily to the negative sentiment expressed so far in the comments, I find branding an important question:<p>If a foundation does good work, you’d want the foundation to receive more money to do more good work.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Edit: made it more readable

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&#x27;s as if you told them you work at &quot;AmaZone&quot;. So you can immediately forget about any bragging rights. The conversation has barely started and you are already at a trust deficit.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>And if you think all that is bad... the annual conference for the Wikimedia community is called <i>Wikimania</i>. Try explaining <i>that</i> to passport control.

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&#x2F;year for the most useful website in existence. What would you rather the money be spent on?

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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Recommended reading for those unaware of how (and what) Wikimedia is actually doing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost&#x2F;2017-02-27&#x2F;Op-ed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost&#x2F;2...</a>

Wikipedia is well known <i>as an encyclopedia</i>.<p>Changing that name to encompass a project which is quite different will be detrimental.

&gt; <i>while shortening “Wikimedia Commons” to its nickname “Wikicommons”</i><p>Literally never seen anyone write &quot;Wikicommons&quot;, in all the years I&#x27;ve heard people talk about Commons, but heh.<p>I don&#x27;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&#x27;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).<p>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&#x27;t see how messing about with the names is an efficient way to carry out that job.

I get the distinct feeling this is from some busy body with too much free time looking to make an impact...<p>Change for change&#x27;s sake is bad. Think of the tech debt.

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 &quot;voting&quot; 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 &quot;notability&quot; in order to... reduce noise? Reduce maintenance cost? Neither is convincing to me.

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. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;3&#x2F;37&#x2F;Global_Wikipedia_and_Wikimedia_Brand_Research_Report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;3&#x2F;37&#x2F;Global_W...</a>

This is a great idea! It&#x27;s honestly long overdue

Okay. Makes sense to me.<p>Now what are you going to do about busybody deletionists with power driving away every single new contributor - and most of the old ones?

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&#x27;m saying. The name Wikimedia is fine.<p>I have seen the future, and there is no place for human writers in it.