[WikiEN-l] Fighting over (R) and (tm) symbols

[Daniel R. Tobias]

There seems to be ongoing fighting over at the [[Certified Financial 
Planner]] page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_Financial_Planner

over whether the page should be festooned with (r) and (tm) symbols 
everywhere the trademarked title of the article occurs, including as 
part of the article's title itself.

It is my impression (IANAL) that such usages are not necessary, nor 
are they standard in English-language writing style, when the usage 
is of a journalistic or encyclopedic nature rather than as part of 
marketing materials.  After all, Wikipedia has many articles, like 
[[Coca-Cola]], that are named after trademarks, but don't display the 
symbols demanded by the lawyers.

At any rate, if such symbols do remain in the article, they ought to 
be done with proper Unicode characters (technically feasible now that 
the site is entirely in UTF-8) rather than their ugly ASCII 
imitations.

-- 
Dan
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