Fwd: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation - Wikipedia-l

21 Jun 2003

      I sent this message to the wrong list. Sorry.
----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
Subject: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation
Date: Friday 20 June 2003 04:19 pm
From: Daniel Mayer 
To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org
Jimmy Wales wrote:
...
I'm pleased to announce the existence of the
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit corporation
organized under the laws of Florida, United States.
I am transferring to this new corporation the assets
that follow:

All Nupedia.com/net/org/etc. domain names

All Wikipedia.com/net/org/etc. domain names

All copyrights in software or articles that were

previously owned by Bomis, Inc. and already placed
under a copyleft license.  (This includes work-for-hire
by Jason, Tim, Larry, Toan, Liz, and myself, as well as
any other Bomis employees who may have worked on
these projects as a part of their job, but doesn't include
any work by thoseparties conducted on their own time
or while not an employee of Bomis.)
Sweet! Thanks for setting up the Foundation (especially with the name
"Wikimedia"). As the owner of the Wikimedia.org and Wiktionary.org domain
names I hereby transfer ownership and control of these domain names to the
Wikimedia Foundation as soon as it is in the position to receive these assets
(per your personal email to me Jimbo).
I also noticed the Nupedia stuff. Does that mean that Nupedia is also now
 part of the Wikimedia family? I'm not certain if the Nupedians (if there are
 any left or who care) would be too happy about that.... Oh well, maybe we
 can bring some life to that project. I still think Nupedia (perhaps under
 the name GNUpedia) should be refactored to be a repository of
 expert-approved Wikipedia articles (along the lines of Larry's Sifter
 project). Thus that project would be a stable distribution of Wikipedia
 content but all editing would still take place at Wikipedia.
Which reminds me that gnupedia.org and gnupedia.com are also owned by Bomis
(IIRC). Are these domain names included with point 1?
Oh, and I'm going to assign copyright to all my edits to Wikimedia as part of
my Will and since I plan on living a very long time it will be awhile before
Wikimedia owns my text. I am still weary about having one entity in control
of so much content (which brings up the possibility of proprietary forks if,
for example, Wikimedia goes bankrupt and creditors try to sell Wikimedia's
assets).
Is there a way for Wikipedia authors to grant Wikimedia the ability to defend
the author's GNU FDLd copyrighted text without requiring the author to
transfer ownership to Wikimedia? Or am I confusing "ownership" and
"assignment"?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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