Talk:Wikimedia Foundation/Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project/Naming convention proposals/Option 3

Take the Wiki, don't push the -pedia

Why push the -pedia if we are not only an Encyclopedia? Why don't take only the Wiki? If there's no option for a discussion, this proposals are completely flawed. -Theklan (talk) 16:56, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Theklan:! Wanted to share more on “Wiki.”

The Brand Project team has often heard from the community how “Wiki” should be used as an option in naming. We agreed and looked deeply into this, developing naming options that used only “Wiki.” The market research conducted showed that there is STRONG association between Wiki and Wikipedia, meaning our movement is likely the most well known “Wiki” group in the world.

But, the Legal challenges for a Wiki-only naming system are profound. We learned that we cannot claim or protect the “Wiki” name, so we would remain vulnerable to organizations implying and benefitting from connection to the movement , even when they do not share our values or relate to our work.

We did not give up at this point. Trying to make “Wiki” work, we rescheduled the naming review (originally planned for May) so we could have more time to push on the possibilities. The Legal team did more trademark reviews and looked at the possibilities across different nations.

We even tried a new "WikiNAME" to see if that would improve the possibilities. It did not. The costs and difficulties of going in this direction are really high, and after discussion with our Board of Trustees on 22 May, we realized that the best option here is this hybrid: strongly protecting the institutions of the movement with the name “Wikipedia” while allowing “Wiki” as an open, unprotected term for the groups who want to use it.

We expect to use design to unite these slightly different names, so it will be clear who is and is not in our movement.

I can understand the frustration and disappointment that the process has not produced a full “Wiki” naming option. And I am grateful for ideas or suggestions for improving this hybrid approach. - ZMcCune (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

@ZMcCune (WMF): WikiFoundation, The WikiFund, WikiNetwork, WikiCluster, WikiConnection, WikiBackBone, ... something that is not Wikipedia. Because WE ARE NOT AN ENCYCLOPEDIA~, we do one, but WE ARE NOT. And even if we were an Encyclopedia you can't propose a decission where all the options are the same. Not fair, not good, not even an idea. -Theklan (talk) 20:31, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

@ZMcCune (WMF): I also fail to understand why the push for Wikipedia, making it the only available option after all the very strong, very vocal and very well argued opposition you've been gathering since the beginning of this process. https://www.wikipedia.org/ is an online Encyclopedia, you are not. Please stop hijacking the name of the encyclopedia for other purposes.--- Darwin ^Ahoy! 20:38, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

Opposition remains

I think I speak for the 90%+ who already opposed any use of the Wikipedia name by the WMF, when I say we still oppose co-opting the Wikipedia name by marketers for re-branding the Foundation. There are too many issues presented, and this idea should have died when it met such resounding disapproval. All 3 of the new options still present the idea that this Foundation speaks for the Wikipedia community, when it absolutely does not. And all 3 of these new options also make Wikipedia seem to be the only project among our sister projects, which is a slap in the face to anyone who volunteered their time outside the realm of just Wikipedia. The WMF has replaced the old idea of "if it's not broke, don't fix it" with "if most of the system is working, break all of the system and pay marketers to claim it is fixed". This remains a very bad idea, regardless of how much money you have wasted on it. — Coffee // have a cup // 23:03, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

We don't own the word wiki

We don't own the word "wiki".

Wikipedia is the most popular wiki site, so it is not surprising that surveys show that in the general public there is a strong association between "Wikipedia" and the word "wiki".

Nevertheless, we don't own this word. Wiki sites existed long before Wikipedia. I first ran into a wiki site in 1997, the year I started using the web, and four years before Wikipedia was founded. Almost all the wiki sites in the world are completely unrelated to Wikimedia.

I should also mention that MediaWiki is neither the first nor the only software platform for wiki sites.

On a more practical and boring side, "wiki" is a generic word that has appeared for years in dictionaries with the sense "a website that allows visitors to make changes, contributions, or corrections". I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect that this means that it cannot be trademarked. And it just shouldn't be. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 09:39, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

• Agree. Legally, this is probably an issue for replacing all uses of "Wikimedia", which raises the issue of having to use "Wiki" and another name side-by-side, leading to even more confusion than using "wiki" everywhere alone (which would still generate substantial confusion). --Mdaniels5757 (talk) 16:44, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

That's right. We don't own it and it is not protectable. And Mdaniels5757 is correct that this was one of the only legally-feasible ways we could do a Wiki system (which was suggested many times by community members and explored on that basis). In this system, the elements of the naming structure that do not require protection can use Wiki. The ones that require it use Wikipedia. In the course of exploring protections, there was also the discussion of what message it would send to try to protect a term that is so important to collaborative culture, as Amir E. Aharoni is alluding to. Similar concerns existed with any naming changes to Free Knowledge, which were also looked at. --ELappen (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

This isn't completely true, though. We could combine Wiki with any other word we choose, and then go ahead and trademark it, so long as it's not already in use. We'd have to show that we actually use it, but that would be pretty easy to do once the WMF changed it's name. It's important that the name not have a ton of meaning beforehand, and the meaning not be overly descriptive, which can be hard. One of the real flaws of this process is the instance that only the Wikipedia trademark (and perhaps the Wikimedia or Mediawiki) trademarks are acceptable, rather than the Foundation taking the risk of developing a new descriptor for itself. TomDotGov (talk) 22:12, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

We don't own it and we don't need to own it. In a nutshell: you pay lawyers to do their job, not to talk about branding. -Theklan (talk) 15:03, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Never change a winning team

 Oppose As a community we did very well for 19 years under the name Wikimedia. Just about everyone with enough understanding of English knows what media are. We have a kind of flagship called Wikipedia, but this is "just" a part of the entire organization and underestimates e.g. Commons, Data and last, but not least "good old" Meta, yes this project, dear coworkers.
Best regards, Klaas `Z4␟` V:  07:40, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

WikiLeaks and WikiHow

If there was one good reason for a rebranding, it would be to differentiate us further from WikiLeaks. We already have people out there who get confused between the two or who assume a connection that isn't there. Rebranding the movement as Wiki would make our one and only real branding problem worse. It would also be an aggressive move against other "Wiki" organisations such as WikiHow. At a time when bullying and harassment are very much out of fashion, it would not be a civil way to treat other legitimate organisations called Wiki such as Wikihow. A few years ago I was involved in a charity that did rebrand itself, the rebrand dropped two words from the name that caused extra work for the staff in handling calls from confused members of the public. I could see a case for the WMF to rebrand itself to something that does not contain the word Wiki, and if the Wikimedia Foundation were to blow some money on renaming themselves as "WMF" or some other name that didn't start or even contain the word Wiki, it wouldn't be their worst waste of money. But "Wiki", whilst the least worst of their three current proposals, does nothing to further their mission of making the sum of the world's knowledge freely available to all, or to differentiate them from WikiLeaks. WereSpielChequers (talk) 16:54, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Strong oppose

We do not own the name "Wiki" and it makes many people confused with other names. Alphama (talk) 04:54, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia Foundation Antarctica

I don't find an explanation on why the chapters etc. should now be called Wiki[mp]edia Foundation + something when they never were. Such a name seems to imply very strong organisational ties, which do not currently exist because chapters legally have no say whatsoever in what the WMF does. We discussed such models in the past, see also Movement roles project/Peer organizations. It's not clear whether this proposal intends to revisit those decisions. Nemo 14:18, 22 June 2020 (UTC)