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

Thu Apr 14 00:30:57 UTC 2005

On 4/13/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> While the current placement doesn't qualify, I don't see why they need
> "authorization" to use the logo to link to Wikipedia.  That's a clearly
> factual use of the logo covered by fair use, and in fact we do the same
> thing with other companies' logos in thousands of Wikipedia articles.

I would agree with this in terms of their use of the logo, since many
other sites, including answers.com (which Jimbo has apparently
approved) use the logo on pages where they use Wikipedia content. It
is only the wording on TheWorldForum.org which makes the relationship
unclear.

A draft trademark and logo policy
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_and_trademark_policy> is under
discussion on the legal mailing list. It currently states:
"You may use the names and logos of Wikimedia projects to refer to us,
link to us, credit us, encourage donations, talk about us, label news
stories about us and so on. We have particular banners for some of
these purposes."

In view of this, I think that Erik was justified in telling The World
Forum that they could use the logo, since that use alone is in
accordance with the policy. He hasn't approved the part about them
claiming to be "in association with Wikinews" and will hopefully be
able to ask them to remove this part. If sites make clear what the
relationship to Wikimedia is, then I believe this sort of use can be
encouraged, which is what the banners and buttons page
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banners_and_buttons>) has
been doing for years.

Angela.