[Foundation-l] wikipedia.it

Brad Patrick bradp.wmf at gmail.com
Thu Dec 14 19:58:14 UTC 2006


"Fork" is not the right word.  They own a domain extension in the TLD for
Italia.  We would like it.  This use is absolutely not a WMF project.

On 12/14/06, Michiel Sikma <michiel at thingmajig.org> wrote:
>
>
> On December 14, 2006, at 6:19 PM, Michael Bimmler wrote:
>
> > I just heard (and saw), that when going to wikipedia.it, there is now
> > a grey banner at the head, stating "hosted by yepa and a link to
> > http://wikipedia.it/disclaimer.html".
>
> This is terrible. It's a blatant misuse of the Wikipedia brand, which
> stands for free and neutral information without conditions. It does
> not stand for advertisements. This big banner is an advertisement and
> therefore an endorsement. How can anybody trust the information in
> the Italian Wikipedia to be neutral if it has a big commercial label
> on it?
>
> > I wonder a bit, whether this has
> > been discussed with italian wikipedia community and whether WMF is all
> > right with this (after all this is probably the way through which most
> > italians access itwiki, rather than via it.wikipedia.org)
>
> Hmm. So when going to it.wikipedia.org, there is no banner. Yet, when
> going to www.wikipedia.it, there is. So that means that
> www.wikipedia.it is really a fork of the Italian Wikipedia, except
> with that one extra banner added to the top? I'm not sure whether it
> is, but that would be a misuse of the Wikipedia brand, I recon, since
> our logo and name cannot simply be used by whoever wants to use it.
>
> I really do want some more information on this, because I personally
> am adamantly against things like this and feel that the Foundation
> also would be, as it directly contradicts the essence of Wikipedia.
>
> Michiel Sikma
> michiel at thingmajig.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



-- 
Brad Patrick
General Counsel & Interim Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
bradp.wmf at gmail.com
727-231-0101



More information about the wikimedia-l mailing list