Wikimedia Foundation/Legal/Brand Stewardship Report

Brand Stewardship Report

The Wikimedia Foundation Legal and Brand Studio teams are working on a report to bring awareness to the unique and shared work across departments of the Foundation to provide stewardship of the Wikimedia brands.

Stewardship is one of the Foundation’s guiding principles and it means ‘caring for or improving with time.’

The goal of this report is to educate people both new to and seasoned in the Wikimedia movement about the complex and fun process of stewarding the Wikimedia brands which includes projects and ongoing processes to amplify awareness, usage, and support as well as maintain and protect legal trademark rights through policy and practice. This report is meant to be evergreen with a cadence of metrics and/or project updates. It will be published on wikimediafoundation.org, similarly to the Transparency Report.

We would like your feedback on the report’s content outline below. What sections are you most interested in? Are there other aspects of the work on trademarks and brands that you would like information about? Please let us know on the Talk page by August 22, 2022.

Content outline

Introduction

• What is a “brand”?
• What are the Wikimedia brands?
• Who and what do the brands represent?
• What is the role of volunteers with regard to the Wikimedia brands?
• What is the role of the Wikimedia Foundation with regard to the Wikimedia brands?

Brand Creation and Protection

• Trademark Registration

Metrics about our current trademark registrations

• Creating New Assets

Example of a design competition

Brand Use

Licencing (Authorized Use)

• Case studies

Example of a movement affiliate’s process of getting permission to use the trademarks

Example of User Group logos

Example of a third party request from film or tv companies

Enforcement (Unauthorized Use)

• Cease & Desist Notices

Thank you to the community for reporting infringement to us!

Examples of some of the kinds of infringement we encounter and how we approach enforcement

• Trademark Oppositions

Insights from Brand Health Survey

Details from the Brand Health Tracker project carried out in January 2022 where surveys were taken in 11 countries to better understand awareness of the Wikimedia Brands