Jens Ropers wrote:
CB low
On 26 Aug 2004, at 08:50, wikien-l-request(a)Wikipedia.org wrote:
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 10:45:17 +0800
From: Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com>
(...) what has bothered me lately is the fact
that Googling for "wikipedia foo" likely brings up one of our mirrors
first, and not Wikipedia itself. So when I see a blatant error
magnified "n" times on the many mirrors on the Internet, it sends a
chill up my spine.
Worse, because those sites are mirrors, and don't accept changes, it
makes it easy for readers to walk off and say, "What a crackpot
project."
So increasingly, the dynamic is changing, and in large part it's due
to Google search results. Whether these mirrors are gaming the search
algorithm or whatever, increasingly "Wikipedia content" does not
reside in a true wiki, because the fruits of publishing are being
removed from the mechanisms of fixing errors. I feel the dynamic of
inclusionism/deletionism and the promptness of when things are fixed
must take this into account.
--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih(a)gmail.com
I'd also say that a lot of it comes from them using the word
"Wikipedia"
in the article title, which seems to be ranked highly by Google. We
should make sure that we have trademark rights in the Wikipedia name,
and then dissuade mirrors from using the name "Wikipedia" for any
purpose other than referring to the real Wikipedia project, or by
express permission of the Wikimedia Foundation.
See
http://www.wipo.int/madrid/en/
For example, according to this, just registering a non-figurative
trademark in CN, DE, FR, GB, GR, IE, JP, KR, PL, RU and SE (based on
countries which are majority native speakers of the "biggest"
Wikipedias, and some up-and-comers) in a single category via the US
Trademark Office will cost only 2873 CHF, or about US $2255, less than
the price of a server. (This presumably includes the U.S, too, since
that's the office of registration and the calculator does not give any
way to tick the host country, but the site is unclear on this detail...)
This seems like a very low cost for ensuring that the Wikipedia
Foundation retains these fundamental rights, and is in a position to
prevent their misuse. It should also conclusively win any domain
battles. Note that there is nothing un-Free about this: Linus Torvalds
holds the Linux trademark, and the Free Software Foundation holds the
GNU trademark, without their trademark rights in any way inhibiting the
rights granted by the GPL on their software.
Neil