[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

Wed Nov 9 03:20:05 UTC 2005

Angela wrote:
> On 11/9/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> 
>>The only question in my mind is the domain: should this be under
>>eb1911.wikipedia.org? We could make it visually distinct, to avoid confusion
>>with Wikipedia itself. Or would eb1911.wikimedia.org be better? Or
>>eb1911.wikisource.org?
> 
> 
> Whether at Wikipedia or Wikisource, I'd rather it was "1911" rather
> than "eb1911". If there are trademark issues with calling it
> Encyclopedia Britannica, then calling it EB just seems a sneaky way
> around that since it's obvious what the EB stands for. It annoys me
> when people use "WP" on sites we'd not approve the use of "Wikipedia"
> since it still implies some official connection, especially
> considering how often the abbreviation is used to refer to Wikipedia.

It's dishonest to call it anything other than the 1911 Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Academics and editors of modern encyclopedias should know what
they are citing. I suggested EB as an abbreviation, not as a way to avoid
trademark issues.

I would appreciate legal advice on the best way to avoid infringing
Britannica's trademark while maintaining academic honesty. Intuitively, a
disclaimer of non-affiliation seemed like a good way to do that.

I didn't suggest 1911.wikisource.org because it violates the following RFC
1035 recommendation by not starting with a letter:

: The DNS specifications attempt to be as general as possible in the rules
: for constructing domain names.  The idea is that the name of any
: existing object can be expressed as a domain name with minimal changes.
:
: However, when assigning a domain name for an object, the prudent user
: will select a name which satisfies both the rules of the domain system
: and any existing rules for the object, whether these rules are published
: or implied by existing programs.

[...]

: The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names.  They must
: start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior
: characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.  There are also some
: restrictions on the length.  Labels must be 63 characters or less.

-- Tim Starling