[Foundation-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia must change with Googling

Thu Aug 26 13:27:44 UTC 2004

Jens Ropers wrote:

> CB low
> On 26 Aug 2004, at 08:50, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:
>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 10:45:17 +0800
>> From: Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com>
>>
>> (...) what has bothered me lately is the fact
>> that Googling for "wikipedia foo" likely brings up one of our mirrors
>> first, and not Wikipedia itself. So when I see a blatant error
>> magnified "n" times on the many mirrors on the Internet, it sends a
>> chill up my spine.
>>
>> Worse, because those sites are mirrors, and don't accept changes, it
>> makes it easy for readers to walk off and say, "What a crackpot
>> project."
>>
>> So increasingly, the dynamic is changing, and in large part it's due
>> to Google search results. Whether these mirrors are gaming the search
>> algorithm or whatever, increasingly "Wikipedia content" does not
>> reside in a true wiki, because the fruits of publishing are being
>> removed from the mechanisms of fixing errors. I feel the dynamic of
>> inclusionism/deletionism and the promptness of when things are fixed
>> must take this into account.
>>
>> -- 
>> Andrew Lih
>> andrew.lih at gmail.com
>
>
I'd also say that a lot of it comes from them using the word "Wikipedia" 
in the article title, which seems to be ranked highly by Google. We 
should make sure that we have trademark rights in the Wikipedia name, 
and then dissuade mirrors from using the name "Wikipedia" for any 
purpose other than referring to the real Wikipedia project, or by 
express permission of the Wikimedia Foundation.

See http://www.wipo.int/madrid/en/

For example, according to this, just registering a non-figurative 
trademark in CN, DE, FR, GB, GR, IE, JP, KR, PL, RU and SE (based on 
countries which are majority native speakers of the "biggest" 
Wikipedias, and some up-and-comers) in a single category via the US 
Trademark Office will cost only 2873 CHF, or about US $2255, less than 
the price of a server. (This presumably includes the U.S, too, since 
that's the office of registration and the calculator does not give any 
way to tick the host country, but the site is unclear on this detail...)

This seems like a very low cost for ensuring that the Wikipedia 
Foundation retains these fundamental rights, and is in a position to 
prevent their misuse. It should also conclusively win any domain 
battles. Note that there is nothing un-Free about this: Linus Torvalds 
holds the Linux trademark, and the Free Software Foundation holds the 
GNU trademark, without their trademark rights in any way inhibiting the 
rights granted by the GPL on their software.

Neil