Wirtualna Polska did not buy Wikipedia. The purchase of Wikipedia is impossible from the legal perspective, since all the copyrights to the project's content belong to a numerous body of volunteer contributors. Those volunteers, remaining in posession of copyrights of the content and taking part in the co-creation of the humanity's biggest encyclopaedia, agree to publish their contributions on licences which enable anybody to copy and modify their work under the condition that the source and the authors are acknowledged and that the copy or modification of the original work is available under the same conditions. Thanks to the licensing model used, the contents of Wikipedia have long been legally used by websites such as targeo.pl, Google Maps, Google Earth Anwers.com, Babylon.com, encyklopedia.servis.pl, wapedia.mobi and numerous other places on the Web. Some of these have been catalogued under http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MIF.
On the basis of the agreement between France Telecom and Wikimedia Foundation, Wirtualna Polska acquired only the right to use the Foundation's registered trademarks in "Wikipedia WP" - the Wikipedia name and logo - as well as the availability of a technical service - a dedicated direct access to the Wikipedia content stream stored on the Wikimedia Foundation's servers. This is not an exclusive agreement - the possibility of signing similar documents is, as the Foundation claims, still open to other partners.
Presentation of Wikipedia as merely one of the Wirtualna Polska services, or just as "service of the wikipedia community service" (lowercase!) creates the impression that Wikipedia has become one of the Wirtualna Polska sub-sites and contributes to a dilution of the Wikipedia brand.
The way Wikipedia functions remains unchanged. Wikipedia, a creation emerging from a revolutionary mechanism that enables editing of its content by any Internet user, has been and will still be available under http://pl.wikipedia.org.
The Wikipedia articles contain references to other sources - including websites. These references are collected and evaluated by Wikipedia's contributors "in such a way as to bring maximum value to the reader and to increase credibility of information published in Wikipedia". All rules regarding to insertion of references to sources and other websites are not altered in Wikipedia. Placement of links between Wirtualna Polska services is solely at the discretion of the portal's operator and has no influence on the Polish Wikipedia content available at http://pl.wikipedia.org/. Wikipedians also have no impact on the nature and content of the links added by Wirtualna Polska and the quality of the information which is connected in this way is to its copy of Wikipedia.
According to our knowledge, the Polish Wikipedia community did not allow, does not allow and will not allow any possibility of placing any advertising content on Polish Wikipedia's pages, unconditionally.
