I seem to recall that there were negotiations underway at some point with the owner of wikimedia.com on transferring that domain name to the Foundation. To this day, there is no content under the domain, not even ads, just a German "Under construction" notice. I would like to inquire what the outcome of the past negotiations was. If they failed, is there any chance that we can get the domain by virtue of owning the trademark rights to "Wikimedia", and the domain name not being used in any other way by its owner?
My interest is primarily that I would like the Foundation site to move from wikimediafoundation.org to wikimedia.org - a domain which is currently just an ugly portal site, but also a subdomain of Meta, the Wikimedia Commons, and the mailing lists. I think having the foundation site there could help to strengthen the Wikimedia brand identity, but when that was discussed in the past, the problem that we do not hold the .com was the main (only?) reason not to do it.
So, to get the ball rolling, what's the situation? If I can help by getting in touch with the owner, I'll see what I can do. Are we willing to pay for the domain, or does it have to come for free? Legal proceedings cost money, too, so if the owner is happy with a small fee, that might be the least troublesome approach.
On a different note, yes, Wikimedia and Wikipedia are very confusingly similar. Individually, our naming choices have been good, but taken together, they're a mess. I think it's too late to rename Wikimedia, with international organizations in place and 2 million Google hits on that name. The best way to deal with that problem, in my opinion, is to give a short explanation on the wikimedia.org page (which would then be the foundation page), with a small icon and a link to Wikipedia.
All best,
Erik
Erik Moeller a écrit:
I seem to recall that there were negotiations underway at some point with the owner of wikimedia.com on transferring that domain name to the Foundation. To this day, there is no content under the domain, not even ads, just a German "Under construction" notice. I would like to inquire what the outcome of the past negotiations was. If they failed, is there any chance that we can get the domain by virtue of owning the trademark rights to "Wikimedia", and the domain name not being used in any other way by its owner?
Negociations were under way with a member of the german association. I do not remember with certainty who. Possibly akl.
My interest is primarily that I would like the Foundation site to move from wikimediafoundation.org to wikimedia.org - a domain which is currently just an ugly portal site, but also a subdomain of Meta, the Wikimedia Commons, and the mailing lists.
? I really do not see what you mean here. Actually, the more time goes by, the happier I am with the full name Many people get confused between wikipedia, wikimedia and mediawiki We certainly need wikimedia.com, but I am not so convinced we should move the site to wikimedia.org.
I think having the foundation
site there could help to strengthen the Wikimedia brand identity, but when that was discussed in the past, the problem that we do not hold the .com was the main (only?) reason not to do it.
So, to get the ball rolling, what's the situation? If I can help by getting in touch with the owner, I'll see what I can do. Are we willing to pay for the domain, or does it have to come for free? Legal proceedings cost money, too, so if the owner is happy with a small fee, that might be the least troublesome approach.
A small fee would be reasonable.
On a different note, yes, Wikimedia and Wikipedia are very confusingly similar. Individually, our naming choices have been good, but taken together, they're a mess. I think it's too late to rename Wikimedia, with international organizations in place and 2 million Google hits on that name. The best way to deal with that problem, in my opinion, is to give a short explanation on the wikimedia.org page (which would then be the foundation page), with a small icon and a link to Wikipedia.
This is the reason I would now rather support using full adress (with a redirection of course from wikimedia.org)
I would be glad if you could take time to fix that up.
All best,
Erik
Anthere-
Actually, the more time goes by, the happier I am with the full name Many people get confused between wikipedia, wikimedia and mediawiki We certainly need wikimedia.com, but I am not so convinced we should move the site to wikimedia.org.
Is it actually true that wikimediafoundation.org reduces the confusion, though? One could argue that it increases it. Compare:
wikipedia.org wikimediafoundation.org
wikipedia.org wikimedia.org
In the first case, there are two differences - the "foundation" suffix and the "m" instead of the "p". In the second case, the only difference is the "m"/"p" difference.
If I give someone the wikimediafoundation.org URL, and they visit it, chances are, they only notice the big difference - the "foundation" - and do not notice the smaller one. They might remember it as the "Wikipedia Foundation". A Google search for "Wikipedia Foundation" turns up 887 hits, so we can take this to be a common mistake. The reality may be somewhat counterintuitive: reducing the name to wikimedia.org makes the small difference more apparent -- leading to the intuition that it is "more confusing", when actually it highlights the difference and thereby reduces the confusion.
Now, there are cases of confusion that will happen between wikipedia.org / wikimedia.org -- but if we redirect wikimedia.org to wikimediafoundation.org anyway, what positive difference does the "-foundation" make? Tell people that they are in the right or wrong place? That's what the content of the website should accomplish. This could be done very tastefully with a nice, prominent icon box both on the wikipedia.org and wikimedia.org homepages.
I also think that using wikimedia.org would be more consistent with its use in our projects such as commons.wikimedia.org, meta.wikimedia.org, foundation-l@wikimedia.org, etc.. wikimediafoundation.org vs. wikimedia.org suggests that there's a difference when they're one and the same. Again, this may add to the confusion rather than reducing it, because we have two domain names in active use.
I don't think the confusion can be reduced by simply using a longer name -- I believe the only way to accomplish that would be to change the main component, the "Wikimedia", but that doesn't seem practical. What are the cases where the confusion would increase if we move the site to wikimedia.org?
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller a écrit:
I don't think the confusion can be reduced by simply using a longer name -- I believe the only way to accomplish that would be to change the main component, the "Wikimedia", but that doesn't seem practical. What are the cases where the confusion would increase if we move the site to wikimedia.org?
Regards,
Erik
I think the issue is NOT entirely the one of "confusion". But also an aspect of image, self-image.
When we use explicitely the word "foundation", we transmit a certain message to the reader.
the term "Foundation" conveys a certain set of concept, about "help", about "support", about "independant organisation", about "funding".
Which the simple term "wikimedia" does not convey.
This is probably why most american foundations have the word "foundation" in their name.
Or most european associations have the word "association" in their name.
I think this is important from a pr perspective.
Ant-
I think the issue is NOT entirely the one of "confusion". But also an aspect of image, self-image.
When we use explicitely the word "foundation", we transmit a certain message to the reader.
Well, we do explicitly use that word on the website. Do we have to use it in the domain name? Let's look at some foundations Google gives us:
Rockefeller Foundation - rockfound.org Ford Foundation - fordfound.org Heritage Foundation - heritage.org Apache Software Foundation - apache.org Free Software Foundation - fsf.org Electronic Frontier Foundation - eff.org Arthritis Foundation - arthritis.org Kellogg Foundation - wkkf.org Open Societiy Institute - soros.org Benton Foundation - benton.org Global SchoolNet Foundation - globalschoolnet.org MacArthur Foundation - macfound.org Hewlett Foundation - hewlett.org Packard Foundation - packard.org Andrew Mellon Foundation - mellon.org Carnegie Corporation - carnegie.org Templeton Foundation - templeton.org ....
Most large, successful foundations have one thing in common: short domain names. Besides the ones listed, many have haphazardly constructed three- or four-letter acronyms, and some major ones even use the ugly shorthand "found" as a disambiguation instead of the longer "foundation". Whenever possible, foundations seem to use the word.org form. Make no mistake, there's plenty of foundations with "foundation" in the URL, but for the cases I could come up with, this is because a shorter name was not available (e.g. gates.org is taken by some guy's mail server). I haven't found a single one which redirects a short name to a longer one.
Having a short domain name is very important. Many people don't use bookmarks, and they will visit a site only if they feel like typing the name. wikimediafoundation.org is 23 characters, longer than every single name on the Alexa top 100 websites list. Conveying the message that we are a foundation is best left to the website content, in my opinion, rather than the domain name. I don't see emphasis as a sufficient reason to keep a long name, otherwise we might as well call it wikimedianonprofit.org or wikimediafreeknowledge.org to emphasize other aspects of importance.
Regards,
Erik
We can always redirect www.wikimedia.com to www.wikimediafoundation.org
This way, people can type the short way to get to the site.
Nicolas [[Ryo]]
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
Having a short domain name is very important. Many people don't use bookmarks, and they will visit a site only if they feel like typing the name. wikimediafoundation.org is 23 characters, longer than every single name on the Alexa top 100 websites list. Conveying the message that we are a foundation is best left to the website content, in my opinion, rather than the domain name. I don't see emphasis as a sufficient reason to keep a long name, otherwise we might as well call it wikimedianonprofit.org or wikimediafreeknowledge.org to emphasize other aspects of importance.
Every single page on every project that the foundation runs should eventually have a link to one of the fundrasing pages. There also should be a direct link to the foundation home page from each of those ~2 million pages (under the "A Wikimedia Project" button). Thus the number of characters in the actual URL of the foundation wiki is not too important.
Having a portal to act as a central start-off point to all the different projects is far more important. Having that at Wikimedia.org makes perfect sense to me. Granted the current one lacks content and inter-project search capability, but that can and should be changed.
-- mav
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On Wednesday, February 09, 2005 6:41 AM Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Erik Moeller a écrit:
I seem to recall that there were negotiations underway at some point with the owner of wikimedia.com on transferring that domain name to the Foundation. To this day, there is no content under the domain, not even ads, just a German "Under construction" notice. I would like to inquire what the outcome of the past negotiations was. If they failed, is there any chance that we can get the domain by virtue of owning the trademark rights to "Wikimedia", and the domain name not being used in any other way by its owner?
Negociations were under way with a member of the german association. I do not remember with certainty who. Possibly akl.
Yes. After I got no respond to my first mail (should be in the archive of this list) I tried it by phone (didn't reach the person who is named in the whois database, but the guy I talked to seemed to qualify for making decisions). He said he would have a look at my mail and would respond - but he didn't. After a kind reminder mail I called him again, and he said again that he would answer the mail - but he didn't.
After that I came to the conclusion that he won't give it away unless we're putting the screws on. So I decided to wait until Wikimedia is registered as a trademark at least in the U.S. Could anyone tell me if this is already done?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks seems a little bit outdated :-(
I'll forward my mails and the contact informations to Erik.
-Arne (akl)
Arne Klempert a écrit:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks seems a little bit outdated :-(
Indeeeeeed. Well, I updated what I knew for certain.
I would prefer Erik, that you do not do anything anymore until we have more information on wikimedia trademarks. Obviously, the owner of wikimedia.com is not very motivated, so best to approach him with something more solid.
Ant
Afaik, the trademark page is not very very outdated, since the only trademarks we recently got are wikipedia in Japan and Europe.
But Jimbo will update it with more information soon.
Given what Akl is reporting, the owner of www.wikimedia.com probably was not very willing to negociate. We do not have more in hands to motivate him yet : we need to ensure wikimedia is registered in the USA, which would be very useful for the negociation. So Erik, please hold on. Thanks
Anthere
Arne Klempert a écrit:
On Wednesday, February 09, 2005 6:41 AM Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Erik Moeller a écrit:
I seem to recall that there were negotiations underway at some point with the owner of wikimedia.com on transferring that domain name to the Foundation. To this day, there is no content under the domain, not even ads, just a German "Under construction" notice. I would like to inquire what the outcome of the past negotiations was. If they failed, is there any chance that we can get the domain by virtue of owning the trademark rights to "Wikimedia", and the domain name not being used in any other way by its owner?
Negociations were under way with a member of the german association. I do not remember with certainty who. Possibly akl.
Yes. After I got no respond to my first mail (should be in the archive of this list) I tried it by phone (didn't reach the person who is named in the whois database, but the guy I talked to seemed to qualify for making decisions). He said he would have a look at my mail and would respond - but he didn't. After a kind reminder mail I called him again, and he said again that he would answer the mail - but he didn't.
After that I came to the conclusion that he won't give it away unless we're putting the screws on. So I decided to wait until Wikimedia is registered as a trademark at least in the U.S. Could anyone tell me if this is already done?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks seems a little bit outdated :-(
I'll forward my mails and the contact informations to Erik.
-Arne (akl)
On Wednesday, February 09, 2005 6:56 PM Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Afaik, the trademark page is not very very outdated, since the only trademarks we recently got are wikipedia in Japan and Europe.
That sounds not very plausible because to my knowledge the US trademark is a pre-condition to apply for registration in the EU according to the Madrid Agreement.
"Trademark registrations have been filed for (pending): Wikipedia, MediaWiki, Wikinews, Others?" <--- "Others?" doesn't make me feel confident that the rest of the list is correct. It would be great to get some more informations about the trademarks. At least registration numbers would be very helpfully to impress domain squatters.
-Arne (akl)
Arne Klempert a écrit:
On Wednesday, February 09, 2005 6:56 PM Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Afaik, the trademark page is not very very outdated, since the only trademarks we recently got are wikipedia in Japan and Europe.
That sounds not very plausible because to my knowledge the US trademark is a pre-condition to apply for registration in the EU according to the Madrid Agreement.
Well, still... according to Jimbo... this is a fact.
I am interested by this agreement ... you mean something can't get protected unless it is first protected in the USA ???
What sort of an agreement is that ?????
"Trademark registrations have been filed for (pending): Wikipedia, MediaWiki, Wikinews, Others?" <--- "Others?" doesn't make me feel confident that the rest of the list is correct. It would be great to get some more informations about the trademarks. At least registration numbers would be very helpfully to impress domain squatters.
-Arne (akl)
Nod. Jimbo promised to do it within the next few days. If not, we need to torture him to do so.
On Wednesday, February 09, 2005 8:04 PM Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
I am interested by this agreement ... you mean something can't get protected unless it is first protected in the USA ???
No. But afaik you can protect a trademark of a country which is member of the Madrid Union in all other countries by filing *one* application.
What sort of an agreement is that ?????
http://www.wipo.int/madrid/en/
Nod. Jimbo promised to do it within the next few days.
That rings a bell ;-)
-Arne (akl)
Anthere wrote:
That sounds not very plausible because to my knowledge the US trademark is a pre-condition to apply for registration in the EU according to the Madrid Agreement.
Well, still... according to Jimbo... this is a fact.
The pre-condition is actually an *application* in the US. I had the same misconception as akl for a long time. There's a Madrid Protocol and a Madrid Agreement, and they are different.
I am interested by this agreement ... you mean something can't get protected unless it is first protected in the USA ???
There's a concept of a "home" country and "other countries". If you are registering first in France, then you can use that to get protection in the US. That is, it is because we are based in the US that the US had to be done first. (Or maybe not, it's all very confusing, all I really know is how I did it.) If you were registering in France, that would have to go first. (Or maybe EU-wide first, I really have no clue.)
Nod. Jimbo promised to do it within the next few days. If not, we need to torture him to do so.
:-)
The stuff is on my desk to give all details.
--Jimbo
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales a écrit:
Anthere wrote:
That sounds not very plausible because to my knowledge the US trademark is a pre-condition to apply for registration in the EU according to the Madrid Agreement.
Well, still... according to Jimbo... this is a fact.
The pre-condition is actually an *application* in the US. I had the same misconception as akl for a long time. There's a Madrid Protocol and a Madrid Agreement, and they are different.
I am interested by this agreement ... you mean something can't get protected unless it is first protected in the USA ???
There's a concept of a "home" country and "other countries". If you are registering first in France, then you can use that to get protection in the US. That is, it is because we are based in the US that the US had to be done first. (Or maybe not, it's all very confusing, all I really know is how I did it.) If you were registering in France, that would have to go first. (Or maybe EU-wide first, I really have no clue.)
Oh, right. That really makes sense then... In this case, akl is really correct... it is curious we got the protection in Europe and Japan before getting it in the home country :-)
Anthere
Nod. Jimbo promised to do it within the next few days. If not, we need to torture him to do so.
:-)
The stuff is on my desk to give all details.
--Jimbo
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Nod. Jimbo promised to do it within the next few days. If not, we
need
to torture him to do so.
:-)
The stuff is on my desk to give all details.
I found public information from the US Patent and Trademark Office (including Madrid Protocol information) that are obviously up to date:
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&state=ip39pb.1.1 Search Term: "Wikimedia" Field: "ALL"
1 78507335 MEDIA WIKI Status: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78507335
2 78483359 WIKIPEDIA Status: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78483359
3 78507349 WIKINEWS Status: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78507349
To get back to the subject, I propose the registration of "Wikimedia"
-Arne (akl)
Arne Klempert wrote:
I found public information from the US Patent and Trademark Office (including Madrid Protocol information) that are obviously up to date:
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&state=ip39pb.1.1 Search Term: "Wikimedia" Field: "ALL"
Damn! (Sessions)
Move to http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm and click "SEARCH trademarks"
-Arne (akl)
Anthere-
This is the reason I would now rather support using full adress (with a redirection of course from wikimedia.org)
I would be glad if you could take time to fix that up.
Angela said she would prefer it if wikimedia.org stays a separate site, unless a big disambiguation notice is added to wikimediafoundation.org. I'm happy to add a disambig notice, but I think it should only cover terms where there's some confusion (Wikipedia, MediaWiki) and be reasonably discreet.
I'll stay out of this whole mess until the wikimedia.com situation is resolved. At that point, it's probably a good idea to ask the community for their input.
Regards,
Erik
It is not a "mess" :-) Either way, while I have a preference, I will gladly accept that another solution is chosen, and the community is welcome to say what it prefers here.
In all cases, as long as we do not have www.wikimedia.com, we should not change anything. So, let's talk about it when www.wikimedia.com is recovered.
ant
Erik Moeller a écrit:
Anthere-
This is the reason I would now rather support using full adress (with a redirection of course from wikimedia.org)
I would be glad if you could take time to fix that up.
Angela said she would prefer it if wikimedia.org stays a separate site, unless a big disambiguation notice is added to wikimediafoundation.org. I'm happy to add a disambig notice, but I think it should only cover terms where there's some confusion (Wikipedia, MediaWiki) and be reasonably discreet.
I'll stay out of this whole mess until the wikimedia.com situation is resolved. At that point, it's probably a good idea to ask the community for their input.
Regards,
Erik
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
On a different note, yes, Wikimedia and Wikipedia are very confusingly similar. Individually, our naming choices have been good, but taken together, they're a mess. I think it's too late to rename Wikimedia, with international organizations in place and 2 million Google hits on that name. The best way to deal with that problem, in my opinion, is to give a short explanation on the wikimedia.org page (which would then be the foundation page), with a small icon and a link to Wikipedia.
IMO, the shorter name can and should be used to present selected content from the various projects along with the ability to search all projects at once or individually. Something like the homepage for InfoPlease but better. http://www.infoplease.com/
At the very least, we should have the current owner forward Wikimedia.com to Wikimedia.org. We can then negotiate ownership transfer costs.
-- mav
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