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Community open letter on renaming

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This open letter was originally published on June 23 on Meta at Community open letter on renaming. As of June 28 it has been signed by 34 Wikimedia affiliates and 350 individual Wikimedians. See this interview with some of the open letter's signers. -S

Open letter on renaming

Volunteers have built up the good name of Wikipedia as an independent, community-driven resource for 20 years. The Wikimedia movement projects, including Wikipedia, thrive on decentralization and consensus. Clear distinctions among the Wikimedia Foundation, affiliates, and individual contributors are essential. Any change that affects this balance demands the informed consent and collaboration of the communities. Therefore, it is of great concern to see "Wikipedia" presented for the name of the organization and movement despite widespread community dissatisfaction.

We, the undersigned, request an immediate pause to renaming activities by the Wikimedia Foundation, due to process shortcomings of the 2030 Movement Brand Project.

  • Assessment of risks during project planning and concept development:[1]
    • High cost for undemonstrated benefit. Renaming constitutes a disruptive change, and does not show a clear link to the promised outcomes.[2] Wikimedia affiliates are concerned about the hazards of using “Wikipedia” outside of a project context and have not found adequate assurances and support.[3]
    • High risks to community identity. These have been overlooked in evaluating naming options. In 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation noted that "Wikimedia is a strongly-held community identity. Name changes have implications for community cohesion and participation."[4] However, it failed to carry these concerns through the process and the surveys.
  • Respect and inclusion of Wikimedia communities:
    • Miscommunication and confusion. Unclear assumptions by the Wikimedia Foundation have led to a lack of confidence in the brand process.[5][6][7]
    • Problematic evaluation and summary of feedback. The choice of metrics, particularly in the August 2019 community review, have put the premise and legitimacy of the process into question.[8][9][10][11]
    • Neglecting the views of Wikimedia communities. Formal and informal channels, including Requests for Comments[12] and straw polls,[13][14] indicated clear problems with the process. The current brand survey focuses on the very name for the Wikimedia Foundation that was overwhelmingly opposed in these community consultations.

Therefore, we ask the Board of Trustees and the Wikimedia Foundation to pause or stop renaming activities.

Every major activity in the Wikimedia movement has been delayed or postponed this year – the global Wikimania conference, Wikimedia Foundation board elections, Wikimedia Summit and Strategy working groups. It is appropriate to treat renaming with the same level of care and concern. Any future work should be restarted only in a way that supports equitable decision-making among all stakeholders.[15]

References

  1. ^ 2030 movement brand project - timeline
  2. ^ WMF, Leading with Wikimedia proposal 2019-02 and Wolff Olins research
  3. ^ Comments on the rebranding strategy, from the chairs of five Wikimedia Affiliates
  4. ^ Slides: November 2015 documents presented to the Board from the branding team, (2015-11). In a video call with affiliates on 2020-06-20, Zack McCune (WMF Director of Brand) concurred that these criteria were absent and should be somehow incorporated into the proceedings.
  5. ^ Requests for comment - Should the Foundation call itself Wikipedia - "I wanted to add a comment here to apologize for the metrics presented in the 2030 research and planning community review results" - Heather Walls, (WMF Chief Creative Officer) (2020-02-17)
  6. ^ 2030 movement brand project - Executive statement - "I take responsibility that we have not managed to bring all of you along on this journey in the way we hoped and intended, or clearly communicated the Foundation’s intentions. I deeply regret causing stress and tension that have increased rifts between the Foundation and many community members." - Heather Walls (2020-06-18)
  7. ^ Board Statement on Branding (2020-06-22) from acting board chair Natalia Tymkiv - "I am truly sorry for all the frustration this whole situation has caused to volunteers, who have engaged in discussions expressing their concerns, and to the staff, who have been working and not really sure if that is really the direction the Board is prepared to seriously consider, or if it is just an exercise on our part."
  8. ^ Flawed indicator for ‘informed people’, 2019-02 - "The community response criteria proposes dividing by the number of people who have been informed. That appears to be a problem. I see no way you can determine how many people have been informed via mailing list or informed via VillagePump postings, unless someone has psychic powers."
  9. ^ Brands - Community Review # Informed people "0.6% of informed oppose (57 users oppose of ~9,000 reached)" (2019-09-06)
  10. ^ Brands - Community Review - Results # Response KPIs - adjusted to "40% of community members oppose"
  11. ^ Brands - Community Review - Results # The metrics used here are troubling- "The metrics used in this consultation were meant to gauge response not to offer a score for the proposal or stand in for a vote of any kind. This was because the proposal was conceptual not explicit." Zack McCune
  12. ^ RfC: Should the Foundation call itself Wikipedia As of 2020-06-22: 41 in support and 468 against for the question “Is it acceptable for the Foundation to use the name Wikipedia to refer to itself?”
  13. ^ Brands - Community feedback and straw poll
  14. ^ Talk: Brands - Community Review - Brainstorm
  15. ^ 2030 Strategy recommendations: ensure equity in decision making and coordinating across stakeholders
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  • It is ironic to call all the undersigned Wikipedians, because a main concern about this whole issue is that contributors to projects other than Wikipedia (such as Wikibooks) may feel like second-class citizens subordinate to editors of the flagship project, i.e., Wikipedia. 4nn1l2 (talk) 00:46, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have a better term we could use? "MediaWikians, MetaWikians, Wikibookers, Wikidataists, Wikinewsians, Wikiquoters, Wikisourcers, Wikispeciesoids, Wikiversitians, Wikivoyagers, Wiktionarians, and Commonists" is a bit ungainly. Perhaps WikiWackJobs? WackyWikiWorers? MMWWWWWWWWWC? Jimbo's Minions? --Guy Macon (talk) 05:17, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It should be noted that the original letter does not have this reference. @Smallbones: Could you change it to something more appropriate? It was probably an oversight. I think 'Wikimedians' would do the trick. effeietsanders 07:23, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
My suggestion is "users". User:4nn1l2 (talk) 08:30, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Users" includes editors and readers who never edit. Was that your intent? One could argue that the future of the encyclopedia and related projects should be determined by those who have contributed at least a moment of time to creating and improving the encyclopedia or related projects. --Guy Macon (talk) 11:41, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
That doesn't matter. Those who have signed are all users (whether editors or readers), but they may not be Wikipedians. "Users" is the superset and always true, "Wikipedins" only a subset and sometimes true. 4nn1l2 (talk) 11:52, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Wikinewsians" are actually called Wikinewsies, at least on WN itself. (If anyone's wondering how I know, I actually contributed there for a short while, but the main work was too stressful.) Glades12 (talk) 14:05, 25 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikimedians is generally accepted when referring to those who contribute across projects. Simply user is fine, although volunteer is probably preferable. Also yes, something something irony.
Besides all that, yes, this whole exercise on the part of the Foundation pretty explicitly devalues other projects. And when I say "devalue" I mean that literally. Perhaps others, at least in the US, remember that stupid game kids would play, where you read fortune cookies and add "in bed" after the fortune so everyone can giggle. I kindof feel like something similar is the subtext to all this, where you read whatever the Foundation is saying and add ...that gets us money.
For example, "we value diversity that gets us money". "We want to capitalize on the brand awareness of Wikipedia that gets us money". Maybe "we value the community of volunteers that gets us money". GMGtalk 12:05, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Wow. the above comment explains every WMF decision in the last ten years. May I have permission to quote you ate WP:CANCER? --Guy Macon (talk) 13:06, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sure. I mean...I don't intend to come off too vitriolic. At some level yeah, I get it. You have to have money to keep the lights on, and we can't lose ourselves in idealism to the point where start to become detached from the real world. I got a scholarship from the Foundation last year to go to Boston. I'm very thankful for that because otherwise I wouldn't have been there.
But at the same time, it seems like the vast majority of the community really just wants the Foundation to just chill out. We really don't need grand leaders here. We already have them, and they're all volunteers. What we actually need are technocrats who are intensely interested in the mundane boring stuff that lets us all get along with making more knowledge more free for more people. To be as cliche as possible, if we build it they will come and we really, hopelesslesy, desperately want you guys to just please God please stay focused on helping us build it. GMGtalk 13:28, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I suppose I have to answer the question "In the version posted here in The Signpost should the author credit and the italicized introduction (which I signed) use the word "Wikipedian" or "Wikimedian"?" This is just a reflection of the overall question addressed - sometimes rather vehemently - about the whole renaming issue. It's not clear to me which way is best. I'll note that the heading on meta for individual signers is "Members of the Wikimedia community" so I probably should have used "Wikimedians" here. I'll ping @Pharos and Fuzheado: who were, to the best of my understanding, part of the collective which did the drafting of the meta letter. Which is better "Wikipedia" or "Wikimedian"? I'll go with what they say - for use on The Signpost for the time being. The overall question is not for The Signpost to decide, so we'll wait for the ultimate decision on the issue by the Wikipedia/Wikimedia community. Smallbones(smalltalk) 13:20, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Smallbones: Of course we meant the open letter for the whole Wikimedia community, and that is the best term, though of course a good part of its strength derives from the experience of many of us as volunteer Wikipedia project contributors.--Pharos (talk) 14:23, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I've change the author credit line to "members of the Wikimedia community: and used "Wikimedians" in the intro. Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:47, 29 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Renaming the WMF (oh yeah, we're also gonna have to replace every usage of "WMF" with "WPF" if this happens, that will be fun) is such a ridiculous idea on so many levels. Renaming it to something including "Wikipedia" is even worse. Wikipedia already has near-100% brand recognition among Internet users, and Wikimedia is only one letter off from Wikipedia. Wikimedia makes sense as a name for the collective movement and is easily understandable as such, even by those who have never directly encountered the WMF before and only know of Wikipedia. Renaming the WMF would serve exactly one purpose: say to everyone that Wikipedia is where our funding and our traffic comes from, every other project is a second-class citizen that only serves to help grow Wikipedia in some way. If that's really the philosophy that the WMF has, then why even bother continuing to host the other projects to begin with? Just spin them off or merge them into Wikipedia proper. If the WMF is continuing to host them as separate entities, then by definition they must have value distinct from Wikipedia. And if they have value distinct from Wikipedia, then they deserve recognition in the name of the whole. QED. Nathan2055talk - contribs 22:21, 30 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
So yeah, turns out they're actually considering doing what I specifically brought up as a dumb strawman argument: merging all or most of the existing non-Wikipedia projects into Wikipedia. I'm not even going to bother explaining why that's stupid and terrible beyond simply linking WP:NOT, the page that literally makes up the first of the five pillars. If the community can't even agree with the WMF on something as basic as "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia", then we have way more problems than just what the WMF wants to call itself. Nathan2055talk - contribs 22:27, 30 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Silly Wikipedian. "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia" is one of those quaint, silly Wikipedia rules that don't apply to the W?F. The equivalent rule at the W?F is "Wikipedia is a whole bunch of gullible saps putting in millions of hours of unpaid effort to make us money so we can increase salaries and make our kingdom larger." I hope this helps. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:19, 1 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Feel free to assume that this stands for "WMF", "WPF", or "WTF".
I call on those who oppose the rebranding to start using "W?F".
"We should have been clearer: a rebrand will happen. This has already been decided by the Board."[1] -- Heather Walls, head of the Communications department at the Wikimedia Foundation and executive sponsor of the Brand project.
Sometimes it is the small things that tip the scales. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:38, 1 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Remember New Coke? Two comments— one straw after another has consequences—the WMF board seems to act as if Wikipedians worked for wages. It seems there are three stakeholders here—(1) the current and potential users of Wikipedia, (2) the editors who produce and maintain the content, and the paid staff (to include the board members who I am sure, get nominal cash & fungible reputations). — Neonorange (Phil) 23:22, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
My question us this: Why does this keep happening? How many time does the W?F have to try shoving something down our throats only to back off when there is a shitstorm of protest before they "get it"? --Guy Macon (talk) 23:56, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
SanFran (the W?F) rakes in tens of millions of dollars off our hard work while they've made no effort, at all. They're only incentivized to maximize utility, which in their minds looks like making software changes to ease the collection of new editors while ensuring the donations keep flowing in. No amount of community dissatisfaction in the past has ever hurt their bottom line, so there's no reason they should proceed carefully. Each employee, perhaps hoping to bolster their resume before jumping ship, has a bias towards doing something, rather than just allowing the status quo. For these reasons, these problems will only continue. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:22, 5 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Neonorange, Guy Macon, and Chris troutman: In general, the vast majority of software changes that have come out of the W?F since...honestly, at least since I registered my account way back in 2011 have been to either improve the on-boarding process for new editors or to retain new editors as best as possible. There have been very, very few changes pushed that were intended to make things easier for veteran editors, and usually when those did happen, they were things like Page Curation that were primarily designed to improve how veteran editors communicated with new editors, and any improvement to the editing experience for the veterans was basically an unintended side effect of the real goal. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of things like the Teahouse, and they've certainly improved the experience for new editors in a very visible and excellent way.
But can you name, off the top of your head, a single major recent improvement to enwiki's software intended primarily for use by veteran editors that came from the Foundation and not from one of the unpaid volunteer editors? The biggest one I can think of is Wikidata, and that ultimately turned out to cause substantially more trouble for editors than it's actually solved (yeah, let's have the mobile app and site pull in article subtitles stored on a completely separate project that's not monitored or vandal-checked by enwiki editors nor even displayed to editors on desktop unless they manually enable an optional gadget (which, by the by, was developed by another unpaid volunteer editor; the W?F supposedly has an "official" solution to the short description problem in the works, but still considers spending millions on rebranding to be a higher priority than developing a solution to something that's been a problem for several years)). I'm willing to give the Visual Editor a pass because I agree that having to learn wikitext is probably an actual significant hurdle to new editor retention, but what about stuff like the Media Viewer? I don't think anyone ever told the W?F that having to load a separate page to view full-size files was a significant issue for readers, much less so a significant issue for editors. In fact, the Media Viewer actually made editing worse during it's initial rollout, as the W?F had initially not bothered to show licensing info in the summary, requiring editors to load another screen to be able to access the information that they were most likely to be looking for other than the media itself; this was eventually fixed, but the fact that it wasn't thought of at all during the initial development just goes to show how out of touch W?F staff developers are from the actual editing processes. Despite all of this, somehow the Media Viewer managed to get a team of at least nine staff developers assigned to it during a development cycle of over a year. And let's not even the touch the whole Knowledge Engine catastrophe: a project that was ostensibly an improvement to Wikipedia's search function (but almost certainly, according to multiple leaked internal documents, began from an ill-advised plan for the W?F to build a competitor to Google Search) had, for at least a full year, the single largest and most well-funded development team in the entire Foundation.
It's very difficult to piece together a real explanation for all of this behavior just from the facts as the W?F gives them. But an application of Munroe's Economic Argument quickly reveals the truth: the W?F, by far, makes most of their donations from readers and new editors. Why would veterans like us donate money to a Foundation that hasn't actually given veteran editors anything useful on the software side for some half a decade, despite that fact seems to be burning cash at an exponential rate, and already has enough money in the bank to keep the servers running for the next century or so? (Per WP:CANCER, the W?F spends around $2 million USD per year on hosting, makes around $100 million USD per year in donations, has around $150 million USD in assets, and has $58 million USD in the endowment with plans to reach $100 million USD by 2026; in comparison, the Internet Archive has managed to make 68 petabytes of data available to the public 24/7 while making only about $20 million USD per year in donations.) And suddenly everything starts to make sense: the W?F spends all of their money on projects to benefit readers and new editors because that's the group most likely to donate. Veteran editors, the group who literally made Wikipedia what it is, are a non-revenue-generating expense that simply need to be placated as cheaply as possible. And this is extremely obvious if you look where Foundation developer time is allocated: of the ten top items on the 2019 community wishlist, three have been completed (coincidentally the ones involving Page Curation, account security, and article exporting), two have been started, and the remaining five haven't even been looked into; the 2020 community wishlist only had five top proposals, and only one has even been started: the article exporting feature...from the 2019 wishlist. Meanwhile night mode, improvements to the watchlist, better notifications, better diffs, and even just letting anyone enable two-factor authentication (a feature that's already finished on the technical side of things) have been sitting all but untouched for years.
But, somehow, the W?F has the money and the resources to perform a global rebranding effort, and one that just coincidentally happens to move the Foundation even closer to the reputation that Wikipedia has built for itself, mostly through it's volunteer editors and not the Foundation, over the past 19 years. The very same Wikipedia that also, just coincidentally, happens to be the Foundation's biggest source of donations by far.
Yeah. I'm not buying it. Nathan2055talk - contribs 05:41, 5 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • It seems that the best "?" is "$". This results into rebranding WMF as W$F inc., aka the Wiki San Fran consortium. The richer they become, the more narrow-minded and arrogant they behave. This reminds me of the corporation that started as "The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and Temple" and became "the Templars", before being crushed down. Pldx1 (talk) 11:18, 5 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you to user:Dan Szymborski(?) for the perfect conclusion: "will the community's opinions be ignored at the July or at the August (Board) meeting? Or is this considered a continual process? This information would help people with their planning." --77.13.106.165 (talk) 21:59, 5 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • What should concern us is what the movement does, not what it is called. And, as pointed out, the missed opportunities and wasted efforts of the WMF, of which this is one. But the actual name is not the problem: and to the extent it matters, my voice would be for the best known and most used name in the outside word in general, the usual principle for WP naming---one based on Wikipedia. To the extent people here think the issue important, whether those in the community of the foundation, they're missing the point. (though perhaps I'm biased, as the various language wikipedias (in practice, almost entirely enWP) are the only part of the project I personally have or want to have any interest or involvement in--except of course for the relevant local geographic sections, whatever they may be called.) DGG ( talk ) 05:36, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • After a quick scan, it appears that a fair analogy would be, in a nutshell: the various individual communities that comprise the WMF adamantly oppose "globalization by the world bank" and choose instead to retain their individual sovereignty and identity. So basically, we could call it "communityism" in the purest form of the word...(except it's not a word, it's an ism)...but it's food for thought, is it not? Atsme Talk 📧 16:26, 11 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm jumping on the opposing bandwagon (even though this is The Signpost's comment section, where nobody has a say on decisions like this). This is a very poor idea that will, for the most part, just make Wikipedia eclipse our other projects even more. W???F staff truly lack understanding for what most volunteers want from them, let alone what is needed to actually keep all these projects afloat. Glades12 (talk) 14:05, 25 July 2020 (UTC), updated 16:08, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Word. This letter couldn't have said it better. HᴇʀᴘᴇᴛᴏGᴇɴᴇꜱɪꜱ (talk) 15:51, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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