2008/9/29 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com>om>: Not spam per se. More a fairly standard if reasonably well done working from home training scam. Not a vast amount we can do about it. They are probably breaking some kind of trading standard laws but well if those kind of laws were enforced online there would be far fewer pyramid schemes. The name is either because they think wikipedia makes it look kinda respectable or because it is a useful keyword (try typeing wikipedia into ebay sometime). -- geni

The WMF has "Wikipedia" trademarked, doesn't it? It looks like a cut and dried case of trademark infringement to me. Whether it's worth doing anything about isn't up to me, but I reckon something could be done if it was wanted. (If memory serves, you have to actively defend trademarks or risk losing them, although I'm not sure if that applies to this kind of infringement - they aren't calling an encyclopaedia "Wikipedia" so it's not making the name generic.)

phoebe ayers wrote: Shame. Having had to give up work through ill-health, the idea of being paid for what I already do seems attractive, but my experience is that there are "work from home" scams out there where one pays up front for "training" on the promise of work, which either never arrives or when you return it is found to be "not up to standard" and you don't get paid for it. Since this type of work is not considered "employment" within UK laws, it is largely unregulated and has a poor reputation, and your legal remedies are effectively extinguished by the contract you sign, not that most people would be able to afford to litigate in any event.

On 9/30/08, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia(a)alisonwheeler.com> wrote: Not true. If I change "wikipedia.htm" to "google.htm" or "myspace.htm" or "youtube.htm" (or any other obscenely popular site I can think of) I get a 404. This might not prove that there was a conscious decision to exploit the name "wikipedia" but as a logical conclusion it becomes exceedingly likely. A more convoluted and less plausible explanation would be that an automated process generated a short list based on criteria (unknown to us) which "wikipedia" happens to fulfill. Possibly litigation-proof but not razor-proof. —C.W.

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 10:14 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Thank you David, I'm still laughing at that. -Chad PS, I blogged it too: http://anyonecanedit.org/blog/2008/10/wikipedia-just-got-cheaper-to-use/