[Wikipedia-l] www.wikipedia.de points to domain seller

Tue Nov 4 03:20:20 UTC 2003

Kurt wrote:
>Indeed, this is really strange. Jimbo, how could this happen?

Because whoever registered wikipedia.de didn't renew the registration. AFAIK 
wikipedia.de was never owned by nor ever an official Wikimedia domain name. 
So its fate was in the hands of whoever registered it. 

Wikimedia already has a whole bunch of domain names that have to be paid for 
(and renewed). If we purchase wikipedia.de then to be fair then we would have 
to do for every other wikipedia.xx where xx corresponds to country code that 
is also a language code we use. That is a lot of domain names for Wikimedia 
to pay for. 

But there is nothing stopping individual Wikipedians from buying these domain 
names and redirecting them to us. Just don't depend on that domain name 
redirect working indefinitely. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)