[Wikipedia-l] Naming and branding for non-English Wikipedias

Sat May 18 07:00:12 UTC 2002

Before we start converting and upgrading things willy-nilly, I wanted to
check on people's (ie, both the Bomis masters' and the general
community's) preferences about the use of the Wikipedia name... 

In the new software, certain classes of page are set off in special
namespaces to distinguish them from actual encyclopedia articles: talk:
for talk pages, special: for interactive functions, user: for users'
personal pages, log: for automatically generated logs, and wikipedia:
for meta-topics that aren't quite meta enough for the separate meta wiki
-- help pages, site news, bug reporting, certain user-involved
maintanence functions, etc. 

For the versions in other languages, at least some of these namespaces
will be translated (particularly talk: and user:). Not difficult
technically, but my question is: what do we do about "wikipedia:"? Both
as far as the namespace for article titles, and the giant "WIKIPEDIA"
that appears at the top of every page with the new "Cologne Blue"
interface. 

Specific issues: 
* The forked Spanish group is also in the process of adopting the new
software, but they're not using the "Wikipedia" name for their project.
It's easy enough to provide an alternative for this and other cases with
a flick of a variable in the code. 

* On the Esperanto wikipedia, we often use a regularly Esperantized form
of the name, changing the foreign "w" to "v" and giving it an "o" noun
ending -> "Vikipedio". This is more comfortable to use -- not just
referring to the EO version, but when referring in that language to
Wikipedia generally -- and the 'pedia has already received web, radio,
and magazine publicity under that name. 

* There are fledgling wikipedias with between 1 and 17 pages for
languages that natively use a non-Latin writing system: Japanese,
Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese. For as long as I've been aware of it,
the Japanese stub page has included a katakana-ized form of the name
(roughly UiKIPIDiA) on the main page, with no appearance of the
English/Roman form outside the URL. 

For page headers and titles and whatnot, should we: 

A) Always use the original English/Roman form "Wikipedia" even if it's
uncomfortably foreign or difficult to type?

B) Always use the familiar/nativized form if there is one, so that users
of each language can comfortably read and type it? 

C) Use "Wikipedia" for the big page header (that's brand recognition),
but familiar/nativized form for the namespace (that's going to be used
in the trenches and needs to be easy for users to type in links)? 

D) Other? 

Personally, I'm leaning towards C.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)