There are better things to spend money on. Like TV commercials. :)
~S~
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote: Daniel Mayer wrote:
Indeed, this is really strange. Jimbo, how could this happen?
Because whoever registered wikipedia.de didn't renew the registration. AFAIK wikipedia.de was never owned by nor ever an official Wikimedia domain name. So its fate was in the hands of whoever registered it.
That's right. The person who registered it offered it to me, at a high price ($500 as I recall, but I could be mistaken about that).
Wikimedia already has a whole bunch of domain names that have to be paid for (and renewed). If we purchase wikipedia.de then to be fair then we would have to do for every other wikipedia.xx where xx corresponds to country code that is also a language code we use. That is a lot of domain names for Wikimedia to pay for.
I think it's actually a good idea to do that.
But there is nothing stopping individual Wikipedians from buying these domain names and redirecting them to us. Just don't depend on that domain name redirect working indefinitely.
Wait! Since we have a functioning system for donations, it is a *lot* better now to just donate money and let me know that you want it to be used for thus-and-such a registration. That way, the domain belongs to the Wikimedia Foundation from the outset, and we don't have to worry about random lapses.
I hope some German-speakers will research who now has wikimedia.de, so we can approach them and hope that they are charitably inclined to give it to us. We could reimburse them for the expenses they have already in terms of registration, or they could just make a gift out of support for our universal ideals.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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