Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-06-28/Discussion report

Discussion report

Community reacts to WMF rebranding proposals

Top story: WMF branding

On June 16, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) hosted a YouTube livestream where they officially unveiled three rebranding proposals, each of which would change the name of the Wikimedia Foundation to one of the following:

Wikipedia Network Trust
Wikipedia Organization
Wikipedia Foundation

The WMF's plan to rebrand and change their name to the "Wikipedia Foundation" has been met with dissent across many WMF-owned sites. Some users have accused the WMF of pushing this change through while ignoring community opposition to the rebranding activities. The WMF has responded to these complaints by issuing statements from the Board that aim to provide more clarity on the rebranding process, as well as by posting a survey asking for community opinions on the rebranding proposals. Notable pages where the community has been discussing this proposed change include:

The English Wikipedia’s recently created WMF village pump.
The talk page for the WMF-created page about the rebranding has been a popular place for discussion for a while.
The community-created RfC mentioned in an earlier edition of the Discussion Report has continued to attract voters; opposers of the name change currently outnumber supporters by a margin of around 10 to 1.
There's also a straw poll asking whether users agree or disagree with each of the following the statements:
1. Any survey about naming proposals should include the status quo as an option, with the same prominence as proposed new names.
2. The Wikimedia Foundation should change its name to one of the 3 Foundation-proposed names. (The three Foundation-proposed names are "Wikipedia Network Trust" [proposal 1], "Wikipedia Organization" [proposal 2], and "Wikipedia Foundation" [proposal 3].)
3. The Wikimedia Movement should change its name to one of the 3 Foundation-proposed names. (The three Foundation-proposed names are "Wikipedia Network" [proposal 1], "Wikipedia Movement" [proposal 2], and "Wiki" [proposal 3].)

The first statement currently has unanimous support, while the other two are opposed by the vast majority of voters.

m:Community open letter on renaming, created to "request an immediate pause to renaming activities by the Wikimedia Foundation, due to process shortcomings of the 2030 Movement Brand Project." As of the time of writing, the petition has been signed by over 330 users and 34 affiliate groups.
Jimbo Wales' talk page, where Jimbo commented on the branding project

In brief

On the reliable sources noticeboard, an RfC is going on to discuss whether or not Fox News should be considered a reliable source. While informal discussions about Fox News' reliability have occurred in the recent past, a formal RfC has not taken place since 2010. The community is divided as to whether news reporting from Fox News (as opposed to pundits like Sean Hannity) can be counted on to be accurate.

Follow-ups

Consensus at Talk:Taiwan determined that the first sentence of the article on Taiwan should describe it as a "country" rather than a "state". This change was also reported by international media (for details, see this issue's In the media).
The left sidebar RfC has been closed, with consensus in favor of:
- Reorganizing some links in the sidebar
- Removing the "Wikipedia store" and "Featured content" links
- Adding an introduction to contributing page, though there was no consensus over which such page to add; a follow-up RfC has been posted to the village pump.
The remaining proposals in the April Fools RfC have been closed. Consensus was reached to ban jokes on article talk and help talk pages, and there was no consensus to ban joke deletion nominations (the closer noted a possible rough consensus to place new restrictions on joke XfDs, but this would require a new RfC).