I want to start a wiki and call it WikiSomething.
It will be wholly owned by me and let’s pretend it becomes very popular and big.
Could the Wikimedia Foundation sue me or have any problem with my site having a “wiki” name?
Please help.
Thanks Matt.
There are approximately one billion WikiSomething projects out there, some of which use Wikimedia’s software and some of which don’t. Just don’t call it Wikipedia.
Depends if Wikimedia has a trademark (registered or common law) on the term “wiki” in the field you intend to use it. Sounds like you want to use it in the same field, so your only hope is that they don’t have a trademark (which is doubtful) or that they allow you to use it.
So your best bet is to ask them for permission.
I don’t know for sure, but offhand, I’d say this is like asking if you can start a “website,” or is that term taken? I think wiki has pretty much become a common noun, and as friedo says, there are a whole bunch of wikis out there, many of which probably use the word “wiki” in their name. I highly doubt that this will be an issue.
If I can hijack, what’s with the whole Wiki thing anyway? The only thing I know of is the Wikipedia, and I just assumed that someone was trying to come up with a clever name.
Okay, even if “Wikipedia” has no trademark, why do you want to call your website something that’s already been “taken” so to speak? As friedo said, there’s probably 1 billion wiki something websites (well maybe not that many), so what would prevent your site from becoming lost among all the others? Why not think of something original? Let’s face it, there is NO confusion when someone mentions Google, Yahoo, the IMDB, and so on.
For the one person on the SDMessage Board that might not know, I have a website, at www.1728.com - Granted “1728” is not the catchiest phrase to come down the pike but I doubt anybody might confuse my website with any other. After all, did you ever hear peole say “NO I was talking about the other Google search engine” ? So, my point is make yourself stand out from the 4 billion other web pages on the 'Net.
The original wiki seems to be here… http://c2.com/cgi/wiki They use wiki as a generic noun/adjective meaning “website that anyone can edit” or “software used to create wikis”, so I’m guessing that’s ok, but I couldn’t find a specific reference to trademarks.