“Can a noncommercial critical website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia think not.

Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. But Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to the project, and it was shut down within fifteen hours for being insufficiently “encyclopaedic.”

Fast forward a couple of months. The artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, have created a noncommercial website that documents the project, called Wikipedia Art. The domain name for the project: wikipediaart.org.

Yep, they used the term “wikipedia” in their domain name. “Wikipedia” is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. And now the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by (legal) force…” Continue reading Wikipedia Threatens Artists for Fair Use by Corynne McSherry, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Edward Shanken wrote on nettime:

Hello all -

I’d like to share an excerpt of a longer piece, in which I discuss some of my views on Wikipedia Art. The full article (an interview conducted by Annet Decker), “Inventing the Future: Art and Net Ontologies,” and will be published in the next month or so in the volume _Walled Garden_ Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2009.

… An example of this balance between friction and lubricity, between limitations and boundlessness in digital art is the controversy in February 2009 over Wikipedia Art. The artists proposed a work of art, the nature of which demands that it be hosted on Wikipedia. This creates friction. Because that context, which is the only context the work can coherently exist in, is hostile to anything that is not verifiable by Wikipedia standards (essentially a reference in a peer review publication.) As there were, at the time, no peer review publications that asserted the authenticity of Wikipedia Art as a bona fide art project, the editors deleted the entry.

Wikipedia itself is an excellent example of a walled garden. It has very strict rules, and there are good things about those rules and there are bad things about those rules. Wikipedia’s rules are meant to ensure that the information in the online encyclopedia is accurate. But those rules also prevent the publication of some potentially valuable information. The Wikipedians accept that trade off because in a larger ecology of scholarly information, Wikipedia is struggling for recognition and acceptance as a respectable, bona fide encyclopedia and must uphold certain standards in order to attain that status.

Wikipedia Art was not censored by Wikipedia. Indeed, the artists provoked the Wikipedians, who responded in a way that was coherent with their rules. Nonetheless, the clash of two incompatible systems — Wikipedia Art and Wikipedia — generated a great deal of tension, demonstrating the limits of each and resulting in fascinating caricatures of artists trying to break rules and encyclopedists insisting on observing them. The theatricality of the interaction was as remarkable as it was predictable.

This clash illustrates the process of negotiation between diverging value-sets that occurs during the shuffling and reconfiguration of boundaries and walls. This is an ongoing process: things build and build and build on themselves such that highly disputed concepts can become so naturalized that it may become difficult to imagine what it might have been like to envision the world from the perspective that challenged them. For example, in the twenty-first century, it is difficult for the untrained eye to grasp what was so radical about Impressionist painting in the mid-nineteenth century. Although Wikipedia Art mounted an intense attack on the inherent values of Wikipedia, it has not succeeded in changing them. If Wikipedia Art ultimately succeeds in posting an enduring entry in Wikipedia, it will be interesting to see to what extent that page strictly follows the rules and to what extent it alters the encyclopedia?s inherent value system. But perhaps what is most interesting about Wikipedia Art is that, at the moment, it inhabits an in-between space. It exists virtually. Although there is no Wikipedia Art page in Wikipedia proper, documentation about the debate between the artists and the Wikipedians currently exists as part of the Wikipedia archive. This form of quasi-existence demarcates a somewhat paradoxical ontological state, a condition of virtuality that seems to be an increasingly prevalent or explicit characteristic of contemporary being. The forms of creativity, communication, and productivity that emerge under these conditions may offer useful insights into the future…

Edward Shanken
http://artexetra.com
Newly published: Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon, 2009)