It appears the below post did not get through at the time it was posted or maybe it was posted to the wrong mailing list (another reason it might be a good idea to have Wikipedia-legal-l@wikipedia.org as a legal issue specific list).
I might have thought it was more a general Wikipedia question than a Wikien-l question and posted it there.
I also generally agree with Imran's statement of the most recent post on the English Wikipedia list concerning this topic (reproduced below) but would like more information before deciding how to present it to them. It appears that their claim to the name is weak and pl.wikipedia.org has already made inroads in Polish speaking communities for use of the name as a distinguishing "mark" associated it with other Wikimedia projects. Knowing when they started using the name (hopefully after the date that the Polish Wikipedia was started) will help to convince them that they have little or no claim to the name.
Alex756
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alex R." alex756@nyc.rr.com To: wikipedia-l@Wikipedia.org; "Daniel Ehrenberg" littledanehren@yahoo.com Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 8:43 PM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: AstroWikipedia
From: "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com
This is probably something that Alex can comment on helpfully.
We probably do need to setup a wiki-legal. In any event, althugh Daniel posted this on wikien-l, I'm moving it to Wikipedia-l.
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
I just found AstroWikipedia, a small polish-language wiki of astrology using PhpWiki at astrowikipedia.com. It seems that they created the name independently of us. Should we do anything? It would be bad to force them to change their name, but should we at least get them to say they're not connected with Wikipedia? LDan
Would be good to get some more information. Did they come up with the name independently? I don't know much Polish, but they appear to be a new site. If they didn't know about Wikipedia (or the Polish Wikipedia) perhaps someone from pl.wikipedia.org should try and contact them and find out more information before deciding what to do. The information: Why did they chose that name? Do they know there is a Polish language Wikipedia? When did they start using the name?
Once we know the answers to those questions perhaps we can make an informed decision about what to do.
Alex756
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 10:23 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] AstroWikipedia
I'll defer to Alex's judgement on this, but yes, that's my thinking as well.
Imran Ghory wrote:
On Sun, 12 Oct 2003, cprompt wrote:
Don't see any reason to. They're not claiming to be connected to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and all our other sites all list which sites are ours.
IANAL. But, my understand is that general use of the term Wikipedia
could
generify it, thus preventing the Wikimedia foundation from gaining a trademark on the name at a later date.
I think we should either move to stop them using the term, or take other actions that would prevent the name being generified.
Imran
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