Hello, I believe that unofficial groups are fairly common. There were unofficial meetups for years in the City of Seattle.
Similar to how computer games, movies, and television shows may have unofficial fan clubs and meetup groups, I believe that the same should be true for Wikimedia. I can understand how problems would arise if unofficial groups tried to use Wikimedia trademarks, such as the name "Wikipedia", to sell merchandise, to do political advocacy, or to request donations. For those types of situations there are affiliation agreements, trademark agreements, and other legal processes that happen between local organizations and WMF. So long as a group is not misusing the trademarks, I think that people who would like to meet or communicate with others who are interested in Wikimedia should be free to do so. Besides the benefits from allowing people to make informal connections, another reason for being somewhat generous with allowing use of the trademarks is that I think that most of us would not want the WMF Board to use the trademarks to try to suppress dissent with WMF decisions from Wikimedia affiliate organizations, online communities, and individuals. Some of us have memories of WMF's use of Superprotect against the German Wikipedia community <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Superprotect_and_Media_Viewer_controversy> . If you are interested in discussing this topic further or have concerns about a specific group's use of trademarks, then I suggest that you contact WMF Legal and/or the Affiliations Committee. I hope that this information is helpful. Thank you for wanting to protect the Wikipedia brand. Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 7:55 AM, Dung Nguyen <dhngu...@gmail.com> wrote: > The issue at hand here is that the linked-to Facebook page is not directly > affiliated with the Wikipedia project. It might share some members, but > Wikipedia has no control over its content. For a Wikipedia project that > has had its share of misconceptions about its affiliations, I think it's > inadvisable to link to a non-official page. Preferably, the page should > meet some minimum requirements to become an official page of the project > and be "anointed" as such before it's linked to from the project front > page. > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
