Wikipedia misinforms about Domaining
No Comments Written by
on
July 31, 2009 – 3:00 pm
As reported by Andrew from Domain Name Wire yesterday, Wikipedia has been redirecting searches for the terms “Domainer” and “Domaining” to its entry about cybersquatting. This shows once again what people from the outside think about the domain industry and the people making a living off domaining. Especially “techies” seem to be spreading wrong information on domaining, although they really should know better. Quoted from the Wikipedia entry:
Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.
While this correctly defines cybersquatting, this is not what domainers do. Luckily, since this issue has been brought up a new paragraph has been added saying:
Cybersquatting is one of the most loosely used terms related to domain name intellectual property law and is often incorrectly used to refer to the sale or purchase of generic domain names.
Also, the term “Domainer” is now forwarding to its own Wikipedia entry, which is still very short and doesn’t provide much information. It’s also written in bad English, so it is urgent that it will be improved to comply with the standards of Wikipedia. But it’s something we can build on. I just hope the aforementioned correction will stay and that the term “Domainer” will continue to go to a page of its own instead of being redirected to the cybersquatting entry again. I guess we all know how difficult it is to correct entries on Wikipedia if the established members disagree with you. The term “Domaining” is still being wrongly redirected to the entry about cybersquatting, so I hope this will be fixed soon, too.
Thanks to Andrew for bringing this up, and thanks to everybody else who has been helping with getting this wrong Wikipedia information corrected.
Copyright (C) 2003-2009 Dominik Mueller.
Follow me on Twitter.
Wikipedia misinforms about Domaining
Related posts:
Original post by Dominik Mueller