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Wikipedia to get single-letter .wiki domain

Kevin Murphy, May 5, 2014, 17:56:48 (UTC), Domain Registries

Top Level Design has scored a bit of a coup for its forthcoming .wiki gTLD — Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has signed up as an anchor tenant.
According to the registry, Wikimedia will use w.wiki as a URL shortener and they’re in talks about other domains.
The company has also applied to ICANN to release hundreds of two-letter language codes that the foundation wants to use for language-specific short links.
The deal is reminiscent of .CO Internet’s launch, when it allocated the now-ubiquitous t.co for Twitter’s in-house URL shortener, giving it a much-needed marketing boost.
The deal for two-letter domains stands only a slim chance of of being ready in time for .wiki’s general availability, scheduled for May 26, in my view.
Under ICANN’s standard Registry Agreement, all two-character strings are blocked, in order to avoid clashes with country codes used in the ccTLD naming schema.
Top Level Design has now used the Registry Services Evaluation Process to try to get 179 two-letter strings, each of which represents a language code, unblocked.
Wikimedia explicitly endorses the proposal, in a letter attached to the March 11 RSEP (pdf)
The organization plans to use domains such as fr.wiki to redirect to French-language Wikipedia pages and so forth.
It remains to be seen whether ICANN will approve the request. It’s previously been envisaged that registries would approach each country individually to have its ccTLD’s matching string released.
Top Level Design points out that the strings it wants unblocked are from the ISO 639-1 language codes list, not the ISO 3166-1 lists from which ccTLD names are drawn.
But it’s a bit of an argument to nowhere — the strings are identical in most cases.
Under the RSEP policy, Top Level Design really should have been given a preliminary determination by now. It filed its request March 11 but it was only posted last week.
The clock, which gives ICANN 15 days to give the nod or not, may have only just started.
After the preliminary determination, there would be a public comment period and a board of directors decision. The timetable for this would not allow .wiki to launch with the two-letter names active.
But even with the delay, it seems that the registry will be coming out of the door with at least one strong anchor tenant, which is something most new gTLDs have so far failed to manage.


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Comments (6)

  1. Tom Barrett says:

    Kudos to Ray and his team for landing this anchor tenant.
    This will move will give it a lot of credibility in the industry.

  2. Adam says:

    I like the move, but won’t this cause more hard and confusion then good?
    The more wikipedia becomes associated with .wiki, the more people will think .wiki stands for wikipedia.
    A wiki is just a website CMS that is editable by the public. Therefore, surely a more suitable brand to use .wiki domain should be an actual wiki editing system like the original wikiweb.
    Also, I would’ve thought a better TLD strategy would be to provide free wiki software for all of these domains.

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      You might be on to something.

    • The most popular wiki software already is free but we’ll have an optional wiki hosting solution that installs your wiki and gives you stellar support, spam protection, backups, upgrades, the whole nine yards. Stay tuned.

  3. Cal says:

    w.com
    great domain !
    oh…
    its w.wiki
    nevermind

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