[Foundation-l] Wikiversity=>Wikisophia

Tue May 10 02:52:46 UTC 2005

Lee Daniel Crocker-
> I don't see how it's acceptable for us to agree to any conditions that
> affect our prerogatives for software use.  We need to use whatever
> software best suits our purposes.  WikiTeX is nice work, and we may
> very well end up using it or something similar.

Of course we're not going to install WikiTeX if we decide that there's a 
better option, but that seems unlikely. WikiTeX is one of the most 
requested features from our users. What has been holding up its setup 
are not criticisms of its functionality, but security considerations. As 
I see it, if we do this, the Board will ask Brion, as a paid Wikimedia 
employee, to assist Peter in the security review and evaluation of 
WikiTeX and if, and only if, it meets our needs and our strict security 
requirements, it's going to be installed. Peter is working on a 
chroot-jail based approach already, which should help to address the 
concerns about possible shell escapes in certain LaTeX macros.

I would never want to make compromises about security or freedom of 
choice. This is more a matter of exchanging favors within the limits of 
sanity.

> Secondly, what's wrong with good old fashioned plain-English multiple
> word names for things like "Wikimedia Schools Project" or "Wikimedia
> Offline" or something?

Wikimedia is not an English language project, for starters. This makes 
it necessary for English language derived names like Wiktionary to be 
localized, which then leads to confusion when you go to a domain like 
pl.wiktionary.org and end up on a site called Wikisłownik. Of course, to 
a certain extent, you will never be able to avoid this, but at least in 
the Latin languages, you can strive for a name which doesn't require 
localization. Wiktionary is not too bad because it's still a neologism, 
whereas something like "Wikimedia Dictionary" would be much worse.

Secondly, if you want a fully descriptive name, this would make the name 
unwieldy and impractical. "Wikimedia Computer Assisted Learning, 
Teaching, Certification and Index of Resources" would obviously be 
unacceptable. You can try making a nice acronym out of it, but then you 
end up with the English language problem mentioned above.

A short and unique name is also useful for searching the project and 
marketing it. That is why companies, including those working in 
academia, come up with short and catchy names for their products. 
Anything unsexy or unwieldy will not be found or linked as frequently as 
something short and memorable. You can trust capitalism when it comes to 
  the mechanisms of meme optimization.

Finally, consistency is important. We have an established naming scheme 
-- our projects have unique names that usually begin with "Wiki-" -- and 
in order to maintain our corporate identity, new projects should follow 
the same pattern. (Incidentally, I named the "Wikimedia Commons" using a 
different pattern because it is not a regular Wikimedia project, but an 
umbrella project used by all others. Regardless, it is often abbreviated 
as "Wikicommons", indicating a strong desire of users to have names 
following this pattern..)

FWIW, the "cute" part of "Wikisophia" is not "-sophia", but "Wiki", and 
we're pretty much stuck with that no matter what we do.

Erik