Wiki giants on a collision course over shared name

By Kevin Rawlinson and Tom Peck

Julian Assange of Wikileaks and  Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia

AP/ REX FEATURES

Julian Assange of Wikileaks and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia

In 1995, an American software developer was told by an attendant at Honolulu airport to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" that connects the airports two terminals. The word is Hawaiian for "fast". On returning to the US mainland, Ward Cunningham named his website "WikiWikiWeb". It allowed computer programmers to share and edit each other's code, the first website of its type.

15 years later, a "wiki" is defined, at least in computing terms, as a website that allows the easy creation and editing of web pages, and the term has entered the vernacular as a result of two web behemoths – Wikipedia and Wikileaks.

Now the two men most responsible for boosting your Hawaiian vocabulary, Wikipedia's co-founder, Jimmy Wales, and the Wikileaks editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, seem to be having a gentle falling out.

In an interview with The Independent, Mr Wales said he was getting a bit fed up of being blamed or praised for the other "Wiki" website. "I get a lot of emails from people who think I run Wikileaks," he said. "There are people who say: 'you are responsible for putting the lives of thousands of US troops at risk', others seem to think I am some sort of freedom fighter, holding governments to account.

"I just roll my eyes, chuckle to myself and tell them they've got the wrong man. Practically speaking, there isn't anything I can do about the confusion between the two companies, I wish they had chosen a different name but I can't go about trying to copyright the word 'wiki'," he said.

Wales launched Wikipedia in 2001 along with Larry Sanger. It now carries 16 million articles (according to Wikipedia) and is the 7th most visited website on the internet.

"There is always a chance that someone, somewhere will start something up which sounds similar. I suppose the only thing you can do is talk to the lawyers," he said.

But he denied that he was considering his own action against Wikileaks.

"I doubt if we will come to blows with Wikileaks in court over their use of the word 'wiki', that's just not our style," he said. "But the issue of having to protect our name is something I can anticipate coming up again in the future."

Wales said that, while the name "Wikipedia" is protected by copyright, his company, he does not want to restrict the possibility for other people to invent new things.

According to the definition of a Wiki, at least the one on Wikipedia, the Wikileaks website is not a Wiki.

Documents submitted to it are assessed and verified by the site's team before publication, and are certainly not user-editable. But in terms of the speed at which it can expose governments, it is true to the word's Hawaiian origins.

Since its inception in January 2007 it has developed a database of 1.2 million documents, from the list of BNP members and the Climatic Research Unit emails, to the recent US government papers on the Afghanistan war.

Wikileaks claims to have video footage of a massacre of civilians in Afghanistan by the US military which it is preparing to release shortly.

  • GT
    Oh, Independent - you used to be cool.

    Let's see if I get this: the head of Wikipedia gets e-mails from people too stupid to bother reading past the first 4 letters of a site's name, complaining about some other site.

    The Wikipedia guy says "That's a shame, but we're not doing anything about it."

    Your headline says that they're on a "collision course".

    Are you folks upset that Charlie Brooker doesn't pay enough attention to newspapers in "This Week in Bullsh!t"? Or have you had an influx of old Soviet era Pravda editors into your staff?

    Seriously - that headline is so incongruous with the content, you might as well just stick The Sun banner on your site and be done with it.

    Cheerio


    GT
  • stupocalypse
    Doighhhhh, i diddunt ethen notiss they boath started wif wiki
  • As "let's you and him fight!" stories go, this is even less substantial than yesterday's Mousetrap bilge. I know it's August, but this is ridiculous.

    It's particularly special in that the article text, and the claimed words of the interviewee, *directly contradict* the synthetic conflict in the headline and the intro. That is, the entire rationale for the article is false, just by reading what the subject is actually claimed to have said.

    And I doubt he said "copyright". Unlike your journalists, Jimmy Wales does know the difference between copyright and trademark.

    Tomorrow: "We write 500 words on vandalism that was on Nick Clegg's article for 35 seconds." Only in your super soaraway Indie!
  • I would like Rawlinson and Peck to investigate why Wikia, Inc. (the privately-funded company that Jimmy Wales chairs) owns the dot-net, dot-com, and dot-us domain reservations for Wikileaks. Then get back to us as to why Jimmy Wales complains about how he and Wikipedia are "confused" with Wikileaks.
  • Why is Jimmy Wales crying about this? He is the Chair of Wikia, Inc., the for-profit spin-off from the Wikimedia Foundation. And Wikia, Inc. owns the domain registrations for: Wikileaks.com Wikileaks.net and Wikileaks.us Maybe the confusion about him being affiliated with "Wikileaks" is because HE IS AFFILIATED WITH WIKILEAKS. By the way, David Gerard is a Jimmy Wales henchman, and although his talking down to everyone is amusing, his opinion about media matters should be discarded.
  • Actually "at least in computer terms" is not accurate. That definition of "wiki" was added to the dictionary some years ago.
  • Jimmy Wales and his crony David Gerard are sone of the least reliable people to ever comment about anything to do with Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, or Wales' for-profit extension, Wikia, Inc. And sadly, Independent reporters Kevin Rawlinson and Tom Peck seem to have not done their homework, either. Over on WikipediaReview.com, we've discussed this flap since August 12, in a thread I entitled "Jimmy Wales: people think I'm responsible for Wikileaks". We since found out and publicized the following facts: (1) Wikileaks.net is owned by Wikia, Inc., which Jimmy Wales chairs. (Evidence: http://reports.internic.net/cgi/whois?whois_nic=wikileaks.net&type=domain ) (2) Wikileaks.com is owned by Wikia, Inc., which Jimmy Wales chairs. (Evidence: http://reports.internic.net/cgi/whois?whois_nic=wikileaks.com&type=domain ) (3) Wikileaks.us is owned by Wikia, Inc., which Jimmy Wales chairs. (Evidence: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/wikileaks.us ) So, I have to ask here, why is Jimmy Wales crying about confusion between him and Wikileaks.org, if his company owns the domains Wikileaks.net, Wikileaks.com, and Wikileaks.us? It sounds like a particular wiki Chairman and his whining henchman doth protest too much.