User:Lionel Scheepmans/Submissions Wikimedia.org project

Submission for Wikimania 2021

Title : Why not starting the Wikimedia.org project as the sum of all sister projects knowledge ?

Author

• Lionel Scheepmans (talk) 13:20, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Session type

Roundtable Discussion (45 minutes)

Abstract

Wikimedia is not Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia movement is much more than a multilingual encyclopedia. But this obvious statement, however, does not seem clear to most people and organizations including some time Wikimedia Foundation which for example only mentions Wikipedia on the page donate.wikimedia.org and want to be renamed "Wikipedia" Foundation.

It is therefore necessary to find a solution so that the Wikipedia project stops being the tree that hides the Wikimedia forest, or rather the planet that hides the Wikimedia galaxy. One solution is to focus on the Wikimedia world rather than the word Wikipedia, by creating a powerful Wikimedia.org website gathering all Wikimedia knowledge.

Presentation

While the public has a hard time distinguishing between the two terms Wikimedia and Wikipedia, the foundation for its part complicates things further with an abortive attempt to use the term Wikipedia for its own name, but also by focusing the public's attention mainly on the Wikipedia project. Just as an example, the page dedicated to collecting donations, only talks about Wikipedia and not about the movement or other projects even if you come from a link situated on one of them.

This approach of the foundation is probably motivated by a concern of efficiency in the collection of funds necessary for its development and the development of the movement it supports. And that's also probably one of the reason of the mission drift observable within the movement that characterizes project idea as Wikimedia enterprise that help big tech company making business and foundation earn money rather than use the same energy to enhance our ability to share knowledge for free. In short, the movement must find a solution so that the foundation's activities and mission can be carried out without Wikipedia becoming the tree that hides the Wikimedia forest, or rather, the planet that hides the Wikimedia galaxy.

One idea to achieve this goal is to focus attention on the Wikimedia world rather than on the word Wikipedia. This can be done in many ways, but the idea here is to launch a new knowledge sharing project called Wikimedia rather than renaming the foundation with the term Wikipedia against the will of many actors. The aim of gathering in one website knowledge available on different Wikimedia editorial projects is no really new. During Wikimania 2019, Cscott, presented a talk named One World, One Wiki!, with the idea to take profit of new translation tool. To this idea, I would like to add that this project could be a unique site gathering the sum of all Wikimedia knowledge by developing a system of content transclusion coming from all the projects, automatic translation of the content of each language into every other language and also provide an enhancement of the content of Wikidata and Wikimedia abstract.

The website could finally have a specific design closer to that of a search engine. And icing on the cake! No need to invest in a new domain name, since the wikimedia.org domain already exists and is currently not profitable. So, let's record a debate about this that can for instance be structured on the question of what are the advantages and disadvantages of such a project, Here is already a draft that can be completed and discussed.

Discussion

Only if the submission is accepted

Learning outcomes expected

• The idea to gather all Wikimedia knowledge in one site is not new (https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Wikimedia_2030/One_World,_One_Wiki!) so this roundtable will just follow previous ideas with new points of view.
• Let's check if the idea could match with strategy 2030.
• Let's see if the idea could fix the lack of visibility of the movement and improve the collaboration between the foundation and volunteers communities.

Additional Speaker

• Psychoslave