[Foundation-l] getting hired to work on Wikipedia? Make that a "website processing specialist"

[Charlotte Webb]

On 9/30/08, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> A quick check (try http://consumerreportingusa.org/ by itself) shows that
> the site is using the pagename requested *eg. 'wikipedia.htm') to generate
> which company it wants punters to think is recruiting.
>
> In terms of trademark abuse it would be interesting (but ultimately
> pointless) to find out. There is 'automated processing' going on as they
> convert the URL into part of the text, but given that the user is -
> effectively - entering that name (or whatever other) then they could try
> to argue that it wasn't them that chose to use 'wikipedia' but the user,
> with them just re-formatting whatever the user had written.

Not true.

If I change "wikipedia.htm" to "google.htm" or "myspace.htm" or
"youtube.htm" (or any other obscenely popular site I can think of) I
get a 404.

This might not prove that there was a conscious decision to exploit
the name "wikipedia" but as a logical conclusion it becomes
exceedingly likely.

A more convoluted and less plausible explanation would be that an
automated process generated a short list based on criteria (unknown to
us) which "wikipedia" happens to fulfill.

Possibly litigation-proof but not razor-proof.

—C.W.