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

Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki at gmail.com
Wed May 18 08:33:36 UTC 2011


Waldir Pimenta, 11/05/2011 02:15:
> On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Martijn Hoekstra
> wrote:
>
>> Back to the issue at hand though: Thomas is (quite generously)
>> offering the enwp.org domain. Would the foundation like to have it?
>
>
> I can only guess that the tech-oriented people don't seem to fancy the idea
> much.

I don't think this is the main problem. enwp.org is certainly not the 
best solution, compared to a project domains + language subdomains or 
single domain one (by the way, not only w.org but also wm.org should be 
considered for that; we should start using our Wikimedia brand, sooner 
or later); but if we had a general service we could have enwp.org and so 
on redirect to it and all projects would still have a fair treatment, 
without great technical hassles.
The problem is that Rob, last time I checked, was definitely not the 
responsible of domain acquisition, and I'm quite sure this didn't change.
Domain acquisition itself has never been a priority (not even a lowest 
one) for the WMF. I don't know (and we never managed to understand) who 
decided to ignore the subject or if it's just because of a lack of 
legal/management staff or other unknown internal problems, but whatever 
the reasons, the result is that we have a lot of valuable (or less 
valuable) domains around, registered by individual wikimedians or 
chapters, unregistered or even (very very sadly) squatted by 
impersonators, but no strategy at all about that.
The WMF could (and should) decide not to buy or take control (as 
trademark owner) of all possible domains which can or have been 
requested (10 second level domains multiplied by 2-3 hundreds TLDs plus 
hundreds of shortcut domains etc. etc. makes a problem), but it should 
definitely define some priority.
This hasn't happened for years even for blatantly higher priority 
squatted domains (there's a list on Internal wiki) and I don't expect it 
will happen soon just to provide URL shorteners, therefore the only hope 
you have is to ask chapters, which maintain hundreds of domains to help 
users. Luckily, they don't need to be the trademark owner if the owner 
of the domain is willing to transfer it.

Nemo



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