Thomas Dalton wrote:
"Dog" isn't strongly associated in the public psyche with a particular brand. "Wiki" is. Like I say, these are complicated issues of legal interpretation and really should be left to the lawyers.
If there is any party with dibs on "Wiki", that would be Ward Cunningham, not the WMF.
Also it is worth mentioning that the MediaWiki software is not a trademark or anything remotely like that of WMF.
MediaWiki serves a huge community of which WMF is just the literal butt-end. Sure, as a single site WMF is t e h biggest. But it still in toto is dwarfed by the userbase in whole.
In terms of dilution of trademark of WMF properties, you would pretty much have to take a WMF projects name and use it as a part or whole of what you were offering. Just using "wiki" doesn't come close to meeting that standard. Ward Cunningham I think famously said that an encyclopaedia built over his software might be something novel, but it wouldn't be a "wiki"; so we should really not be too tight-ass about things, if Ward was laid-back to deliver a keynote at a Wikimania anyway. Getting Ward to deliver a full brimstone and hail Jeremiad against misappropriation of the term "wiki" is the best that you could ask for in the particular instance discussed here. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen