I thought that a basic rule of thumb was to use a trademark (r, tm, or
p) symbol at the first usage of that word. However, in my experience, it is
usually accompanied by a footnote specifying the owner of said trademarks,
and, as you have stated, is not typically utilized in encyclopedic
materials.
I went back and looked at the history to see what you were talking about
(current version doesn't have them). My main comment is that the trademark
symbols should have been inserted correctly, using the actual (r) symbol
instead of the (R), which is just distracting. The trademark (tm) should
have appeared without parenthesis and in superscript and all caps.
Carl
On 8/30/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
There seems to be ongoing fighting over at the
[[Certified Financial
Planner]] page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_Financial_Planner
over whether the page should be festooned with (r) and (tm) symbols
everywhere the trademarked title of the article occurs, including as
part of the article's title itself.
It is my impression (IANAL) that such usages are not necessary, nor
are they standard in English-language writing style, when the usage
is of a journalistic or encyclopedic nature rather than as part of
marketing materials. After all, Wikipedia has many articles, like
[[Coca-Cola]], that are named after trademarks, but don't display the
symbols demanded by the lawyers.
At any rate, if such symbols do remain in the article, they ought to
be done with proper Unicode characters (technically feasible now that
the site is entirely in UTF-8) rather than their ugly ASCII
imitations.
--
Dan
Dan's Web Tips:
http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site:
http://domains.dan.info/
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