User:Czar/drafts/WMF

[This] is not a theoretical discussion. This is much more concrete than that. It is about whether the Wikimedia Foundation should call itself the Wikipedia Foundation. For reasons that have been discussed at length on this page and on many others, for many years, by many people, me included, believe this is not a good idea.

Not because I do not recognize how much easier the work of the WMF would be if it called itself the Wikipedia Foundation. I am against it, because the Wikimedia Foundation simply is not the Wikipedia Foundation. You cannot force yourself to become the Wikipedia Foundation by using the name. The name is taken. End of story.

I used to run Wikimedia Germany. And my life would have been so much easier if I could have called myself the Executive Director of Wikipedia Germany. Every conversation with funders, museum directors, politicians (and with my mom and dad), I had to start by explaining what Wikimedia is, and how Wikimedia is related to Wikipedia. Oh, how they would have looked at me if I had called myself the Executive Director of Wikipedia Germany. However, it would have been a fraud, because the Executive Director of the German chapter simply is not the Executive Director of Wikipedia Germany. And the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation cannot be the Executive Director of Wikipedia or the Wikipedia Foundation. This is what this is all about.
— Schreibvieh (talk) 18:58, 20 June 2020 (UTC)