Waldir Pimenta, 11/05/2011 02:15: > On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Martijn Hoekstra > wrote: > >> Back to the issue at hand though: Thomas is (quite generously) >> offering the enwp.org domain. Would the foundation like to have it? > > > I can only guess that the tech-oriented people don't seem to fancy the idea > much.
I don't think this is the main problem. enwp.org is certainly not the best solution, compared to a project domains + language subdomains or single domain one (by the way, not only w.org but also wm.org should be considered for that; we should start using our Wikimedia brand, sooner or later); but if we had a general service we could have enwp.org and so on redirect to it and all projects would still have a fair treatment, without great technical hassles. The problem is that Rob, last time I checked, was definitely not the responsible of domain acquisition, and I'm quite sure this didn't change. Domain acquisition itself has never been a priority (not even a lowest one) for the WMF. I don't know (and we never managed to understand) who decided to ignore the subject or if it's just because of a lack of legal/management staff or other unknown internal problems, but whatever the reasons, the result is that we have a lot of valuable (or less valuable) domains around, registered by individual wikimedians or chapters, unregistered or even (very very sadly) squatted by impersonators, but no strategy at all about that. The WMF could (and should) decide not to buy or take control (as trademark owner) of all possible domains which can or have been requested (10 second level domains multiplied by 2-3 hundreds TLDs plus hundreds of shortcut domains etc. etc. makes a problem), but it should definitely define some priority. This hasn't happened for years even for blatantly higher priority squatted domains (there's a list on Internal wiki) and I don't expect it will happen soon just to provide URL shorteners, therefore the only hope you have is to ask chapters, which maintain hundreds of domains to help users. Luckily, they don't need to be the trademark owner if the owner of the domain is willing to transfer it. Nemo _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
