[Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: Do WMF want enwp.org?]

Brian J Mingus brian.mingus at Colorado.EDU
Wed May 11 05:33:06 UTC 2011


On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:28 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 11:22 PM, Keegan Peterzell <keegan.wiki at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > With regards to the wi.ki domain, I asked people at the WMF back in
>> 2009
>> > about whether they were interested in buying it given that the owner at
>> the
>> > time had a notice on the site saying he was willing to sell. The
>> response
>> > came back that they were concerned it could be problematic since neither
>> > the
>> > Wikimedia community nor the WMF has a monopoly on the word "wiki" and
>> the
>> > WMF didn't want to overstep their claim to the concept.
>>
>>
>> I think that is a good reason to leave that alone.
>>
>> --
>> ~Keegan
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
>>
>
>
> It didn't get much attention, and since we've basically agreed against the
> .wmf TLD in addition to wi.ki, I'd like to throw my support behind Ryan
> Kaldari's suggestion of obtaining the w.org reserved name.
>

Here's an interesting bit of history from Wikipedia:
http://enwp.org/Single-letter_second-level_domain

"Only 3 of the 26 possible Single letter Domains have ever been registered
and this before 1992. All the other 23 Single Letter .com Domains were
registered Jan 1 1992 by Jon Postel<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel>,
the father of the Internet, with the intention to avoidthat a single company
could commercially control a letter of the Alphabet. This makes it
impossible for companies like Mc
Donalds<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mc_Donalds>
 or Deutsche Telekom <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Telekom> to buy
their Logo "M" or "T" as an Internet address."

It seems that giving w.net/com/org to the WMF would be in line with his
vision of no corporation controlling a letter.

-- 
Brian Mingus
Graduate student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder


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