New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Wikipedia owner Jimmy Wales says that WikiLeaks has not completed the paperwork on some Wikia-owned domains it transferred and that Wikia will let the domain names expire.

Although some people confuse the two entities, they have no official relationship.

Wales started the encyclopedia site called Wikipedia, which has involves people working collaboratively to write and edit online encyclopedia entries. Julian Assange started WikiLeaks, the organization that obtains secret documents from governments and businesses for the purpose of leaking them to the public.

However, when WikiLeaks was created in 2006 someone there issued a press release referring to it as the Wikipedia of secrets, which was trademark infringement. Therefore, someone at Wikia “defensively” registered several domain names to avoid the possibility of confusion between the two organizations.

At some point, Wales decided there was no problem and Wikia transferred ownership of those domain names, including wikileaks.com, wikileaks.net and wikileaks.us, to WikiLeaks. Wales said all Assange needed to do to complete the transfer was to sign in and finish the transfer.

However, no one at WikiLeaks has done that. So the transfer remains incomplete.

Wales said he has tried, unsuccessfully, to get Assange to complete the transfer. But that Assange tells him he is too busy fighting superpowers.

With the domain names set to expire Wales said he wouldn’t renew them again.

Allowing domain names that you want to keep expire is viewed as risky.

There is generally a 30-day grace period to register domain names that expire. Then the domain name goes into a redemption period before it can be resold at auction.

But people sometimes wait until it’s too late.

That means someone else, who isn’t busy fighting superpowers could eventually buy the domain names wikileaks.com, wikileaks.net and wikileaks.us.

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