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.
* Update: The inevitable has happened. The “Domainer” page has been removed by Wikipedia and it’s being redirected to the cybersquatting page again. I don’t know what to say really. One should think the Wikipedia community was interested in spreading the truth rather than in supporting a questionable agenda.
Thanks to you as well Dominik for carrying this message forward and raising others’ awareness. I am writing a master page on domaining that I hope to submit by Sunday. It will be rather comprehensive, and should put an end to what these uneducated mods at Wikipedia have done to an entire industry & community.
There used to be a main page for “Domaining” which was quite informative explaining the difference between a domainer and a cybersquatter — sad that someone would delete that just because they have some hidden agenda which involves promoting domainers as cybersquatters. I’d also like to know why a Google search for “Domaining” ends up with a wikipedia link to their article on cybersquatting as the second result — people linking to that article trying to convince someone domainers are cybersquatters?
M. Menius, thanks for investing so much of your time on this matter. I really hope you can convince the Wikipedia mods about the quality of your article. Stephen Douglas has posted the names of some respected Wikipedia members/domainers in the comments section below Andrew’s article. Maybe getting their support will help.
Reece, it’s too bad that some people just want to badmouth others due to an agenda I personally cannot understand. I wonder what we can do to achieve a better reputation for the domain industry. I’ve been talking to many people from various industries about domaining and I’ve repeatedly defended domain investing not only on my blog but also on forums and in conversations. But I’m afraid it’ll take more than that for a serious rethinking.
I do have the suspicion that it’s mostly people from other technology-related industries who are campaigning against domaining. They seem to reach a larger audience than we do, unfortunately.
Then again, we know that it’s hard to build a good reputation but easy to destroy one. Every court ruling against domain owners, every case of cybersquatting sets us back again. We must change the way we go about our businesses, we must not accept other domainers engage in cybersquatting and typosquatting, no matter how well-known they are. It is positive examples this industry needs, negative examples have been documented too often already.
By the way, the “Domainer” page, which was online on Wikipedia until earlier today, has now been removed as well. It is forwarding to the article on cybersquatting again. It’s a shame, that’s all I can say at this point.