[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikinews-l] TheWorldForum.org adds Wikinews logo

Wed Apr 13 16:56:57 UTC 2005

Jimmy,

I have asked Drog to remove the logo box, at least temporarily. I find 
this very sad and would like to hear your rationale why this is 
necessary. TWF follows an NPOV/MPOV-style policy and has been very 
helpful to us, and their additional free advertising is very nice for a 
still-small site.

I never authorized an "In Association With" heading and am happy to 
suggest alternatives, and Angela is correct that the "Visit our 
sponsors" link (which refers to the Google ads above it) was misleading; 
again, I gave no authorization for that. In any case, as you may recall, 
you appointed me as "Wikimedia Foundation Content Partnership 
Co-ordinator" on February 18, 2004, which I (it turns out, wrongly) 
believed at least gave me some additional leeway to do these things.

Is there any other procedure I should have followed, and if so, where is 
it documented?
	http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logos
doesn't say anything. Nor does:
	http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_trademarks

I believe that logos and buttons that people can click on are a natural 
thing on the web, and that we should be fairly relaxed about people 
using our logos (especially those of projects which need exposure), 
unless it's clearly against our interest to do so. Firefox' trademark is 
not diluted by people putting Firefox buttons on their homepages - it is 
diluted by another web browser calling itself "Firefox-XP".

A project which prides itself on being free content gains nothing from 
treating logos as precious intellectual property that needs to be 
protected from evil.

Erik