Forum:Brand name for this wiki

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Brand name for this wiki

Before this site gets huge, we will want genealogy magazines and history journals to review it. "Genealogy" would be misleading in ordinary text. Talking about "the Genealogy Wikia" is a bit of a mouthful; we need something a bit shorter but still distinctive. Wikia Management would probably be quite happy to try to get it registered as a trademark or give it some other protection if possible.

Please comment on the idea (and on each of my suggestions below).

WikiGenea

Echoes of Wikipedia, an established word that we are clearly related to. There are people who think that "wiki" is an abbreviation of "Wikipedia". Let's give them an alternative.Robin Patterson 01:31, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm kind of leaning toward WikiGene/WikiGenea, I can't decide what sounds better. But I agree about the Wikipedia-related thing. -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 01:40, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Or WikiGenes? -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 01:41, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

What about Wikialogy ? Honyng

GeniStory

• as in Genealogical history, or Stories of Family Genesis.

Familypedia

Comments? ~ Phlox

• Bigger market footprint- folks may not care for libraries and genealogical studies, but everyone has a family and folks usually have at least one ancestor they think is worthy of respect. user:Phlox

Fampedia could be an alternative for this one. -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 22:34, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

The more I thought about it today, the more I think we need to get Family in there somehow. But that doesn't exclude genealogy references. On Wookiepedia, they do a tagline- "the Star wars wiki". We can do the same "Fam- whatever: the Genealogy wiki(a). ~ Phlox 08:47, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

That image looks awesome! -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 22:47, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I like this one as well. Will 23:11, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, No one is using the quartz skins so if no one objects I will load it as a trial logo. ~ Phlox 02:14, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Of course, if we choose any branding other than Genealogy wikia, if it is going to make sense then we have to have it in the site name (eg familypedia.wikia.com) and probably the Project namespace changed too. Which is ok, because the bot can convert over all the Genealogy: links, and changing the site name is an apparently minor switch. Opinions? ~ Phlox 00:47, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Probably no need to change the project namespace. Robin Patterson 01:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Doubtless our Google advocate has examined the googling results on "familypedia" and decided they don't count. We may be able to do a deal with http://www.rhamill.com/familypedia/index.php?title=Main_Page but the others may put up a fight. Robin Patterson 01:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought about it. If some such threat materializes, we can handle it. But it is unlikely for a number of reasons I sketch below so I don't see any reason to get paranoid about it.

Right now, creating a good first impression, the ease of remembering the term, the quick intuitive grasp of the purpose of the site from the name, easy word of mouth, close association and leveraging of the wikipedia brand make it a good candidate to fulfill our key near term goal of establishing a beachhead.

If down the road there is some difficulty, then worst case we torture the name into Fampedia, Familikia, or other not so memorable names. Once we have a solid beachhead of contributors and social network bringing in traffic, it won't matter because we will have already started snowballing.

Why my lack of concern? Marvel wikia, World of Warcraft wiki, Star Wars fanon wikia, Guild Wars Wikia... These are some of our biggest wikia and they all use trademarked names. So I'm not sure why it is relevant that some folks advocating emotional IQ boosting for the family happen to use the same name. Besides, they haven't even trademarked it nor given any notice of such business interest in protecting use of the name. From their business perspective, we are unthreatening. We aren't trying to grab any of their customers, or sell anything related to what they are selling. If anything, our popularity would help them. So Wikia could TM it now if they like, because there is no overlap between Family history encyclopedia and Emotional IQ products. If the name were used by big folks with a lot of dough they might shovel money into the pockets of lawyers if they thought wikia had money. But it would have to be a good bet for them that they'd do a lot better than break even on the settlement. Nope- any legal fireworks would just be bad business. ~ Phlox 04:12, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Fampedia

Shorter than "Familypedia" and has been used for a website, which disappeared - see google's cached version. Robin Patterson 02:55, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Change Branding to Familypedia?

It seems to me that Familypedia is pretty memorable and would do well as a brand for our start up years.

Anybody that has an opinion one way or the other on rebranding, please join in. It is a far reaching change, so let's give it a month but close this off by this time next January. ~ Phlox 16:59, 9 December 2007 (UTC)