The current ticket is more of an RFC on the path forward regarding these domains.
History
Both wikimedia.ro and wikipedia.ro have been registered more than 10 years ago by (then active) members of the community. They were maintained by various people (including myself) as redirect to ro.wikipedia.org, mainly because various websites would link to wikipedia.ro instead of wikipedia.org. Owners were fairly responsive even after they stopped being active on Wikipedia
Current status
Last year the .ro TLD introduced yearly fees, which meant that this was a good moment to change ownership. Unfortunately, neither of the owners responded to my emails.
- wikimedia.ro expired and was then snatched by resellers; the owner is a private person, so contact information is not publicly available
- wikipedia.ro is still owned by the same company as before
Options
Since the owners of the domains are not responding, I would like to ask for the WMF's help in obtaining the domains based on the ownership of the trademarks. I am not sure of the path to follow for that, as it seems the rules of the TLD only say that they cannot get involved in mediating such disputes.
As to the future of the domains, my suggestions would be:
- keep wikipedia.ro as a redirect to ro.wikipedia.org. While low-traffic, there are some links out there that are currently dead.
- make wikimedia.ro a redirect (or even the main address for romd.wikimedia.org.
If the WMF cannot provide these services, the domain could be transfered to the WMROMD user group and I can handle the technical part as I have in the last few years.