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interface which many do not use (mainly because it's outdated, doesn't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).