14 DAY TRIAL // Wikimedia Foundation has announced that it managed to register a victory against paid editing of the world’s largest online encyclopedia.
The not-for-profit organization has managed to obtain orders that prevent four websites advertising a service of paid editing of articles on Wikipedia from abusing the “Wikipedia” trademark.
This is particularly important, especially since paid editing on the platform has made quite a few headlines in recent years, following several scandals on the topic.
“Undisclosed advocacy editing is against the values that underpin the Wikimedia projects. In 2013, Sue Gardner, then-Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published a statement clarifying that ‘paid advocacy editing’–a term used on English Wikipedia to describe edits that are paid to promote a specific viewpoint–is a ‘black hat’ practice,” Wikimedia wrote.
The idea is that the online encyclopedia edits should be done for free or, at the very least, without the financial interest of someone involved. However, a number of sites, such as wikipediapagecreators.com, getonwikipedia.com, getawikipedia.com and onwikipedia.com, contained similar words and tried to make an extra buck out of the experience, charging $799 (€596.3) to build a Wikipedia page for a business.
The Wikimedia Foundation has rarely modified the rules for editing on the site, but in recent years, it has found itself trying to legally enforce the rules it set in place for paid edits.
“After months without change to the websites, and no response to our messages, we filed UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) complaints with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The complaints explained that the registrant of the domain names was violating Wikimedia’s trademark rights,” said Yana Welinder, chief of legal and policy work for Wikimedia Foundation.
The World Intellectual Property Organization ruled in favor of Wikimedia and said the domain names were confusingly similar to the Wikipedia trademark and that, on top of this, they were also being used in bad faith.
All the disputed domain names are to be handed over to the Wikimedia Foundation with the help of GoDaddy, the domain registrar that is now forced to comply.
“These decisions are a victory for the integrity of the name ‘Wikipedia,’ which symbolizes the reputation and goodwill created by the hard work of thousands of independent editors and content providers. The Wikimedia Foundation registered ‘Wikipedia’ as a trademark in order to ensure its use is consistent with our mission. Trademark protection allows us to prevent abuse of the ‘Wikipedia’ marks by those trying to take advantage of the value the community has imbued in those iconic representations,” Welider added.