Domains

Wikimedia maintains many domains for a variety of reasons, including:

Serving content (e.g. wikipedia.org)
Redirecting users (e.g. misspellings such as wikepedia.org)
Trademark reclamation against malicious domains that abuse e.g. typosquatting
Internal development usage (e.g. the internal-only development domain wmnet.org)

Not all domains under the Wikimedia community are owned by WMF; some are owned and operated by trusted community members.

WMF utilizes both Markmonitor and porkbun for domain management; Markmonitor is the main domain registration entity while porkbun only exists for some savings for .wiki TLD registrations.

Administration

Registration of domain name ownership for WMF is handled by the legal team. DNS management is handled by the SRE team, largely Traffic.

Canonical domain names

While the Foundation may own many other domains for trademark, legal, or project/redirect reasons, there is only one small set which are considered to be the canonical set for actual projects and content, which are subjected to higher security standards:

mediawiki.org
w.wiki
wikibooks.org
wikidata.org
wikifunctions.org
wikimedia.org
wikimediafoundation.org
wikinews.org
wikipedia.org
wikiquote.org
wikisource.org
wikiversity.org
wikivoyage.org
wiktionary.org
wmfusercontent.org

Subdomains

The canonical domains are subject to higher security demands. Unless there's a good reason to do so, do not plan on using a domain/subdomain from the list of canonical domains.

New subdomains must abide the following:

DNS should resolve to servers hosted by WMF: No third-party services may be used. Making services look as if they originate from WMF servers but instead send users to another organization's servers would break our trust relationship (i.e. our privacy policy).
HTTPS standards must be followed.
Agreement from both Legal and Traffic teams that it's a good idea to use subdomains for this purpose (it requires more than simple registration to maintain subdomains).

Some examples of subdomains that didn't make the cut:

status.wikimedia.org: Third-party hosting service and inadequate HTTPS practices. Instead became wikimediastatus.net
mastodon.wikimedia.org: Third-party service (Mastodon hosting by a third party, not internally). Had we deployed our own Mastodon server, we could have used this domain. Instead became wikimedia.social.

Parked domains

WMF has two types of domain parking: Redirection parking and dead parking. Domains using either type are listed in operations/dns's templates directory.

Redirect-based parking: Using ncredir, WMF redirects many unused domains to proper ones (e.g. wikepedia.org → wikipedia.org). This is the most common form of parking as we generally want "incorrect" domains to redirect users in helpful ways rather than error out.
Dead parking: Domains that are registered with few (or no) records attached. This parking is usually reserved for previously-owned, malicious domains that we'd rather just not exist (e.g. expletives denigrating Wikimedia in the name): We just hold on to the name and do nothing with them. All domains with an arrow pointing to parking use this method of parking.

Redirect-based domains are automatically managed/created with ncmonitor.

Designations

Domain Name	Purpose	Comment
.wmnet	Internal private TLD
enwp.org	Shortcut domain, e.g. enwp.org/banana → en.wikipedia.org/wiki/banana	Not to be confused as a shortener like w.wiki
toolforge.org		cf. blog post
w.wiki	Official Wikimedia URL shortener
wikimedia.community
wikimediacloud.org		cf. blog post
wmcloud.org		cf. blog post
wmflabs.org		Prod DNS servers do not handle this domain. OpenStack Designate.
wmfusercontent.org	User uploaded files on Phabricator and Gerrit