[Foundation-l] Rethinking brands

Tue May 8 10:45:23 UTC 2007

On 5/8/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anthony,
> The "Stichting Open Progress" owns the domain "WiktionaryZ". We were told by
> the Wikimedia Foundation that we could not use the name WiktionaryZ for our
> project when it sadly became clear that our project would, for now, not be a
> WMF project. Consequently we had to suffer the pain of renaming / rebranding
> our project to OmegaWiki. We own the domain and it is still generating
> traffic ..
>
Thank you for this info.  To clarify something which I had to look up,
"Stichting Open Progress is the Dutch not for profit organisation that
is the legal organisation behind OmegaWiki."

It apparently is *not* a for-profit enterprise as I had incorrectly assumed.

Anthony

> Almost all occurrences of the name WiktionaryZ have been changed to
> OmegaWiki except for some pointers that indicate that we have a history.
> This history is ours. It is as unthinkable for the WMF to use the phrase
> WiktionaryZ as it is indeed our domain.
>
> For Erik there is no conflict of interest as the name WiktionaryZ is no
> issue at all; we do not use it. On an organisational level, Open Progress
> and the Wikimedia Foundation are in my opinion sister organisations who work
> very much together to achieve the same or similar goals. The role that Erik
> plays in the Stichting Open Progress and the role that Erik plays in the
> Wikmedia Foundation is known to both organisations. So when there is a
> potential conflict of interest it is a declared conflict of interest.
>
> The technology and the data of OmegaWiki are respectively Free Software and
> Open Content. We aim to provide technology and we hope / expect that this
> functionality we are developing in Open Progress will be used where
> applicable.
>
> Thanks,
>     Gerard Meijssen
>     Voorzitter Stichting Open Progress
>
> On 5/8/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> >
> > Erik, according to your page on meta you work for the company
> > OmegaWiki, which owns the domain name wiktionaryz.org.  Wouldn't you
> > say that there is a conflict of interest here in your proposal of a
> > plan which would severely dilute or destroy the Wiktionary trademark?
> >
> > Anthony
> >
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> >
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