On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.comwrote:
Back to the issue at hand though: Thomas is (quite generously) offering the enwp.org domain. Would the foundation like to have it?
I can only guess that the tech-oriented people don't seem to fancy the idea much. From this thread we have the following (explicitly stated):
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 11:12 PM, Ashar Voultoiz hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Can we please stop multiplying the number of domains? Although the registration is cheap, the administration overhead is not that cheap.
Plus the implicit indifference signaled by the absence of other inputs from the tech staff despite their being asked at least once --so we were told-- to comment on the issue.
There's also a thread about this from 2008 in wikitech, especially this message from Brion
On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
I strongly recommend against making links through *any* unofficial alternate domain, whether WMF owns it or not. (Perhaps especially if WMF owns it!) Sooner or later someone will forget to renew it and it'll become a squatted spam site. :)
-- brion
[source: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/137602#137602]
Well, I don't think this should be a valid impediment. I mean, don't domain registrars send reminders when the expiration date is close? Even if they don't, can't the tech people set one themselves? There must be some sort of system already in place for the several top-level domains we already have: one for every project (which amounts to 7), plus wikimediafoundation.org, mediawiki.org, and the .com, .net variants of many of these and god knows what else (funny, mediawiki.net seems to be owned by WM-IT).
So, on one hand I can understand the resistance towards adding even more domains to that mix: the enwp.org would set a precedence for others in the same vein, and this would mean up to 7 (projects) * ~200 (languages) domains. Even if we assume only a handful of these would get enough demand to be registered, it could easily double or triple the number of domains currently managed by the WMF. In fact, if we assume only the .org domains I noted above (9 in total), adding the current shorteners I have knowledge of (enwp.org, frwp.org, enwn.net) means a 33% growth.
On the other hand, as I said, there are likely more than the 9 .org TLDs I mentioned, so there probably is (if not, should be?) an automated system of reminders or something to that effect. This system could easily be extended to add one or a few more.
Waldir