Two users on the Icelandic Wikipedia (Spm and Svavarl) have been considering buying the Wikipedia.is domain for the Icelandic wikipedia. This email is sent to you (Jimbo Wales) as well as the WikiTech list and the WikiIS list to inquire about political will to do this so to speak.
Technically we could do this without any involvement from Wikimedia Svavarl has already voulenteered to host the DNS servers and (apperently) to pay for it. The cost being 10,000 ISK pr. year + tax which is about $160 USD.
Which brings me to the point of this all, i would like to know if the Wikimedia foundation would be willing to write all interwikilinks to the icelandic wikipedia as http://wikipedia.is or http://www.wikipedia.is (depending on which we choose) instead of http://is.wikipedia.org and whether this would require that it have legal custody of the domain ( which would be no issue at all for us ).
Our reasons for wanting a domain are threefold, first none-.is domains are generally shunned in Iceland for aesthetic reasons, .com, .net and .org domains are generally associated with something none-professional, no corporation or respected institute would use them. Second is the charge for foreign downloads in Iceland is about $3 per 100MB, this of course is measured by IP addresses and not by TLD's however the general misconception among the general population is the opposite, for this reason many do not visit none-.is sites when they approach their download limit which ranges from 100MB to 4GB for common ASDL connections (going from 100MB to 4GB cost about $50). Third the Icelandic wikipedia does not show up in many Icelandic searches, most notably not by leit.is (a search engine used by technophobes) and by "$query site:is" on google, though it should be noted that passing the hl=is option to google will turn up is.wikipedia.org. This only happens when using the Icelandic google interface which many do not use (mainly because it's outdated, doesn't list news, froggle and others).