Wiki 3.0 Project name brainstorming

Hello all,

Wiki 3.0 is the code name of a new project to build a new modular wiki UI which will support multiple backends to store Wiki data.
You can learn more about the project by reading its design page.

Wiki 3.0 is not a name we’d like to keep as:

  • it’s not fun
  • the 3.0 can be confusing, and we definitely don’t want to be associated with anything “web3”.
  • it’s not original

So please suggest any name ideas you can think of, and in a next step we’ll proceed to a vote for the name we’ll actually use.

Thanks!

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Hi,

As finding snappy project names is usually fairly difficult, we could look at the translation of some project keywords in different languages. For example, we have the translations of the term “knowledge” here : Knowledge in Different Languages. Translate, Listen, and Learn

Also, this article seem to provide some interesting advices when it comes to choosing the project name.

Hello! So glad we’re starting to discuss this! :star_struck:

As excited as I am to finally name the project, I think it may be a tiny bit early for that, but for sure is worth exploring ideas for later.

The UI/UX impact on the name

If the UI/UX of the project will be more on the unique & innovative side, we might need to adapt to that. For example, suppose we really wanted to go for that real book feel, flipping pages interactions and all. We should probably link the name of the project to that. Of course, this is just the first example that came to mind, we don’t have to have flipping pages animations :sweat_smile:

The idea is to focus on what makes the new project special from everyone else on the market.

Examples

If we look at the most liked knowledge management tools their UI/UX heavily supports their name.

  • Notion → reducing a ton of knowledge to the most simplistic ideas. Its default UI clearly supports this goal, it’s literally black, white, very simple, thin lines.

  • Obsidian → very durable, jet-black rock. It’s main theme clearly supports the name and the architecture is clearly supporting the file over app philosophy of the CEO(Steph Ango), durability aspects.

Of course, there are a lot of very popular examples where their UI doesn’t play a big role in the name and so their name focuses either on the end goal or on the main action that the user does in the software:

  • Roam - comes from the verb “to roam” which is kind of like “to wander”. This makes a lot of sense because of their graph-focused knowledge management - focuses on the main action of the user

  • Evernote - clearly focuses on the end goal, long-lasting notes

  • Confluence - confluence is what occurs where two or more flowing bodies of water join to form a single channel, focuses on the end goal of complex collaboration

  • Nuclino - probably going for the idea of nucleus, in a way trying to go for what Notion did (reducing to the notion = reducing to the nucleus, getting to the nucleus of things), focuses on the end goal

  • Taskade - task + cascade - “transforms the chaotic mind into an organized hierarchy of cascading tasks” - focuses on the end goal, but also on the main action (making tasks)

will add more when I’m remembering others

Prerequisities

I feel like we might have to define our philosophy for the new project and a main idea for the UI/UX (pretty much what differentiates the new UI from Notion and the main competitors) before we actually name it.

Main Needs

If we ignore the UI/UX aspect, I think the name should:

  • be mainly between 2-3 syllables,
  • each syllable clear and sound,
  • a variation of existing words
  • shouldn’t feel like two words (one shouldn’t feel the need to pause between the words) - this is more of a subjective view on product names, I know there are a lot of popular products that have two words combined in the title. I don’t like two words in the name because you’d need a higher effort to remember it (hopefully I find a research on this, at the moment it’s just an assumption)
  • if we have two words combined in the title: the first word shouldn’t end in a sound that is very similar to the second word’s first sound (CryptPad is an example of this, unfourtunately, even if I truly love the name’s meaning - it can sound like crippad depending on the accent of the person)
  • respect the philosophy that we agree on
  • should derive from known english words, but not usual words (words that everyone knows but doesn’t use everyday). I chose english because it’s easy to pronounce for everyone in the world. The words shouldn’t be very usual because they have to evoke something unique, special about the product.
  • should revolve around positive stuff, beautiful stuff
  • should have a .com and .org available
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I agree it’s early but, we need this discussion now as the name we’ll use might end up being used in the code quite a lot. It’s does not need to be the name we keep forever, but at least a first ok-ish name we can start with (and if we are lucky, keep longer).

Thanks a lot for the project name guidelines, I’ll keep them in mind :slight_smile:

Also, this is a brainstorm so feel free to propose anything that comes to mind, we can curate later.

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Podul (Bridge in Romanian). But the “pod” part might be misleading.

Podul eh? Probably from Latin for foot.

Ponte in Portuguese, from XIII century Latin Pontem, from classical Latin Pons (Pontifex Maximus being the name of the old highest priest of Rome, meaning “greatest bridge builder” (not known if literaly over the Tiber or figuratively, between men and gods)

Anyway, how “bridge” would be related to your product? Does it bridges, literally or figuratively something?

A bridge between people and knowledge?

  • Pontiwiki Maxima.

  • Wikiii, the III being 3 in Roman numerals?

Some ideas that I came up with:

Doldory - from the romanian word doldora which means abundance. I was thinking something like the horn of (knowledge) abundance.

Knowflake - from snowflake, but it might sound too much like snowflake

Inapod - in-a-pod, like together

WaveRig - made-up word that would literally mean to rig a wave. I’ve always seen information and knowledge as a wave, or water or something the flows. The challenge comes when you want to structure it properly, in a specific desired way… to rig it.

Origami - as already known, the art of folding paper. Paper → docs → files. Folding → Using something existent to create something else (as you do with stored knowledge)

Foldity - continuing from the idea of folding, I’ve made up a substantive that tries to contain everything that can be fold → every piece of knowledge that can be used = a knowledge base

Archeon - from archetype
Archefy - made up verb meant to mean to make something an archetype

Sempreno - sempre means forever. I was going for SempreNote but it’s way too long and so I settled for sempreno which would direct to durability, long lasting knowledge.

Noteling - it’s inspired from the way Darkling or Earthling sounds, supposed to mean related to notes. I think it sounds kind of cute.

Verity - defined as a true principle or belief, especially one of fundamental importance. I think this stands very well for well-researched knowledge.

Everity - combining ever with verity

Tandem or Tandemo - tandem means together, but may seem like we are a social or dating site

Garner or Garnery - from the verb to garner = to gather or collect (something, especially information or approval). It may sound too much like Gardner…

Beekon - from the word beacon = a light or fire in a place that is easy to see, such as on the top of a hill. Also, we have the phrase “ a beacon of humanity ” which means a shining example of humanity. I was thinking it might work if we are thinking of ethical knowledge management cause it implies, well, ethicality, and overview.

Orbital - it comes from atomic orbital which is a function describing the location and wave-like behavior of an electron in an atom. It’s pretty scientific, still self-explanatory, it does imply beauty because of its connection to planet orbits and send to the idea of diving deep into knowledge till you reach the atoms of it.

Orbeetle - comes from the word orbital, obviously. Orbeetle is actually a pokemon that is famous for its high intelligence and psychic abilities . This may seem silly as a product name, but it’s highly connected to information and beetles are generally known for their very durable exoskeletons. I find beetles, especially the blue milkweed beetle (which was always connected to magical stuff), pretty nice, but I understand if this is subjective :sweat_smile:

Cadabra - from abracadabra, implies something magical

Zora - well, for me it has a double origin. Sora or Zora means sky in japanese. It’s pretty, it’s simple. The second origin, but the first that came to my mind, is the Zora tribe from a very popular Nintendo game (The Legends of Zelda: BOTW) which was revolved around water. Their entire kingdom was all about water flowing and waterfalls and it was incredibly beautiful. As I said before, i see knowledge as water and so I felt this would work well.

Paperton - paper (docs, files) + ton (suffix that implies a group of people or a town)

Scribian - from scrib ( the Latin root word scrib and its variant script both mean “write), but in a way elevated because of its suffix

will come back on this if something else pops into my mind

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Why not something derived from “cross”, as it could refer to the fact that it would be usable by different projects (cross projects / crossroads / …), like the idea of a bridge, like @mleduc gave.

Also, “cross” makes a cool reference to the X of the XWiki logo, which would indicate that the project would be extensible in the same spirit :slight_smile:

With this idea in mind, I propose “Crux”, which means “the heart” / “the essence”.
(though, It’s very consonant to pronounce)

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Sadly, as with many short names, it’s already used by some other company :frowning: (https://www.cruxdata.com/)

oh nice catch, I searched for it but didn’t find anything on my side (at least in the first search page)!
I’ll have to look for another derivative! :eyes:

suggestion: knowledge → (latin:) scientia → wiki + scientia

  • wientia
  • wikentia

(xientia.com already exists)

Hi All,

Taking the idea that the UI/UX is a very important part of this project, I’m thinking that having a word that is naturally implying something “beautiful” would be a good idea.
In this light I was thinking at Crystal of Diamond, which in addition to be “beautiful” are also extremely solid which represents the hard work we want to do on the architecture of it.

I would go more towards Crystal which is shorter and more general than Diamond.
We could use Crystal alone but also as Crystal Wiki.

I’ve searched for “Diamond Wiki” and “Crystal Wiki” and could not find many things that would overlap with our usage of the name.

Note that we would also use Cristal to mark our French origins and distinguish ourselves a bit from the common word in English

As a general note, using an existing word makes it a bit harder to find/differentiate in google searches and stats. An example is “Confluence” or “Notion” are harder to search for or target in trends. This is why “xwiki” was a good name IMO. Even if Crystal or Cristal is nice, it would make it less easy to target as a made up name.

Going in the direction of beautiful material or stones we could look at shiny stone names:

Here is a list:

I like Topaz for example in that list.
There is also Emerald (Emeraude), Quartz, Turquoise

There is also Shiny but this one does to imply as much the “solidity”

Ludovic

I agree that it’s more difficult.

Now if it’s combined with “Wiki” it can work. “Cristal Wiki” does not get a lot of results… neither “Topaz Wiki”.

Maybe it means there is a choice between a common name which brings an idea to mind, versus a “unique name” which will make this more difficult. One approach is to have a simple orthographic change from the common name to keep the “meaning” of the work while being unique.

inxientia?

Since we are just discussing ideas as of now, how about

witty (sounds similar to wiki; it also relates to intelligence and somewhat knowledge); also have a .com and .org domain available

YWiki (after X, we have Y and even Z (but apparently there is something as ZWiki, also very easy to guess from the name that it has something to do with the parent organization XWiki)

If not considering any existing words as pointed out by Vincent

lumos is one of the many magic spell in the Harry Potter universe, which eliminates darkness as it is a wand-lightning magic spell

Krypton

Xenon

Argon

I think many noble gases have very cool names, they can be considered. Also I think smaller names like XWiki would be better to 1) remember, 2) type

Proton (but could be confused with the popular mail service: https://proton.me

Why not something more straightforward like “Cross Wiki UI”, which could be stylized as “XWiki UI”, showing that it belongs to the same company?
I recognize that it is not as fancy as the other proposal, but at least it is explicit about what it is. :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. In order to converge towards a result, we are going to close the brainstorming next Monday (September 25).
Then, I’m going to curate the proposals, make a shortlist (e.g., removing names that are too close to existing software names) and we’ll proceed to a vote on that shortlist.