[WikiEN-l] Announcing Wikimedia Foundation

[Daniel Mayer]

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:
>
>1. All Nupedia.com/net/org/etc. domain names
>2. All Wikipedia.com/net/org/etc. domain names

>3. 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)