Wikipedia's Content Ripped Off More Egregiously Than Usual

Ultraexactzz writes "Wikipedia's content is licensed under the GFDL, which permits such content to be copied with attribution — and Wikipedia is used to its content being copied and mirrored. However, a new website at e-wikipedia.net appears to have taken this a step further by mirroring the entire English Wikipedia — articles, logos, disclaimers, userpages, and all. Compare Wikipedia's About page with e-wikipedia.net's. The site even adds to Wikipedia's normally ad-free interface by including text ads." Just try logging in or actually editing an article, though, and you'll get the message "The requested URL /w/index.php was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." If there's credit here, I don't see it — sure looks like it's intentionally misleading readers.

Comments

I guess we can

[Inglix the Mad]

chalk another one up to greed. This doesn't surprise me in the least.

Re:I guess we can

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't surprise me in the least.

Not even in the least? Then why didn't you stop it, you monster?!

Re:I guess we can

[Swampash]

Another fine product from... MAJESTIC STUDIOS!

Re:I guess we can

[kernelphr34k]

My guess is that it was the CHINESE!!!!!!!!!!!

Re:I guess we can

[dnwq]

For the unaware: Majestic Studios.

This is perfect!

[Darkness404]

This is perfect! Next time a teacher or other person in authority says I can't use Wikipedia because it is unreliable I just get the content from this site and I can say that it wasn't Wikipedia!

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is perfect! Next time a teacher or other person in authority says I can't use Wikipedia because it is unreliable I just get the content from this site and I can say that it wasn't Wikipedia! Have you considered using the references that are linked by Wikipedia instead?

I just don't understand why anybody would ever cite an encyclopedia. Unless they were studying encyclopedias, of course. It is about as useful as citing a dictionary.

Re:This is perfect!

[pclminion]

This is perfect! Next time a teacher or other person in authority says I can't use Wikipedia because it is unreliable I just get the content from this site and I can say that it wasn't Wikipedia!

Crap like this is exactly WHY Wikipedia should not be cited formally as a reference. Even if Wikipedia could be trusted to be 100% correct (which it can't), how do you know you're not looking at some fake shit? Wikipedia is great for personal research. For formal citation, it's garbage. For one thing, the content can change. This is part of what makes it powerful, but it also makes it useless when cited on paper. You go to the URL and see something totally different from what the author was trying to cite.

Re:This is perfect!

[compro01]

1. Cite to a specific version of an article.

2. Or cite to the items the wikipedia article cites. I find wikipedia to be a nice "springboard", as I can go to the references, and then to the reference's references, and so on. Quick way to get useful and cite-able info.

Re:This is perfect!

[geekoid]

The science articles in wikipedia are better the any other source. Several tests of this have been made.

In theory, it won't work, in practice it does.

There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia that can't happen in any hard bound book.

Most things are garbage for profession citation...hell most profession citations are garbage.

Re:This is perfect!

[tlhIngan]

This is perfect! Next time a teacher or other person in authority says I can't use Wikipedia because it is unreliable I just get the content from this site and I can say that it wasn't Wikipedia!

Crap like this is exactly WHY Wikipedia should not be cited formally as a reference. Even if Wikipedia could be trusted to be 100% correct (which it can't), how do you know you're not looking at some fake shit? Wikipedia is great for personal research. For formal citation, it's garbage. For one thing, the content can change. This is part of what makes it powerful, but it also makes it useless when cited on paper. You go to the URL and see something totally different from what the author was trying to cite.

Actually, no encyclopedia (Wikipedia or otherwise) should be cited formally. It doesn't matter on how accurate it is, or who can edit it, or anything. An encyclopedia is not a primary source. It's a good starting point to find primary sources (and for those of us who aren't using it formally, a source of information) and general background information to pursue one's research, but that's it. This is most evident in Wikipedia's "No original research" stance - it knows it's not a primary source of information and it shouldn't be.

The fact that Wikipedia is freely editable means one should really go to the original source for information.

Re:This is perfect!

[DaveV1.0]

1) Fail. Because the if the specific version of the article is false or misleading, you will have used invalid data.

2) Which is exactly how you should use wikipedia.

Re:This is perfect!

[Sloppy]

1) Fail. Because the if the specific version of the article is false or misleading, you will have used invalid data.

Aren't you facing the exact same risk whenever you cite any other source, too?

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Fail. Because the if the specific version of the article is false or misleading, you will have used invalid data.

Aren't you facing the exact same risk whenever you cite any other source, too? The key words are "exact same" risk. No, the risk is not exactly the same. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and is peer reviewed by none. Compare this to an article in a scientific journal or a textbook. The level of attention to accuracy is not even close. Wikipedia is good for an encyclopedia, but it is leagues away from anyone being able to consider it to be a reliable source.

Re:This is perfect!

[JonathanBoyd]

The science articles in wikipedia are better the any other source. Several tests of this have been made.

You need to check those tests carefully. On average, science articles in Wikipedia may be more accurate than those of similar encyclopedias e.g. Brittanica, but they're not better than dedicated scientific texts and journals.

Re:This is perfect!

[bluefoxlucid]

Wikipedia is constantly peer reviewed, by everyone.

In MAJOR articles like those on neuroscience, biology, core computer science, mathematics, etc, Wikipedia tends to contain fewer inaccuracies per text unit than Britannica. Britannica is researched by a single person or closed group, leading to a lack of distributed peer review by experts in any field other than scholarly pursuit.

In other words, well-written Wikipedia articles have fewer probable (statistics) factual inaccuracies than your typical formal encyclopedia article. Small, uninteresting, or poorly written Wikipedia articles probably have errors, and are of a quality that wouldn't make it into a formal encyclopedia.

Re:This is perfect!

[bane2571]

While you are right and scientific journals/textbooks are usually the most accurate source I would argue that wikipedia is definitely peer reviewed and sometimes even more accurate than (some) textbooks.

A challenge for you: make a change to wikipedia that is blatantly wrong and have it stay for 24 hours. The point being that if you could achieve that for wikipedia then you'd likely be able to get the error into a textbook. The difference is that once it's in a textbook it's wrong until the next edition, wikipedia is wrong until someone notices.

Re:This is perfect!

[bluefoxlucid]

Yet Britannica et al are considered better for this than Wikipedia. All experts in the field can contribute to Wikipedia, while only hired researchers contribute to Britannica. A dedicated scientific text WILL have contribution and peer review by many experts in the field, and of course is a good source of information for inclusion in Wikipedia{{citation}}.

Re:This is perfect!

[Nar Matteru]

The science articles in wikipedia are better the any other source. Several tests of this have been made.

In theory, it won't work, in practice it does.

There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia that can't happen in any hard bound book.

Most things are garbage for profession citation...hell most profession citations are garbage.

{{fact}}

Re:This is perfect!

[Arterion]

Wikipedia has gone beyond a traditional encyclopedia, though. Both in how many topics it covers, and that detail of information on each topic. For some articles, the information listed it more detailed than some textbooks I've seen, but of course YMMV. I'm not saying it should be a primary source, but not for the reason of "it's an encyclopedia!"

Re:This is perfect!

[schmu_20mol]

Depends on what you are looking for. Admittedly for a narrow range of subjects there are wikis for which authors get voted for and peer-reviewed by editors and the community. The computational neuroscience community would be a good example (cf. http://www.scholarpedia.com/). It's quite comfortable to have the original author/inventor of an idea helping out the community.

Re:This is perfect!

[nine-times]

Aren't you facing the exact same risk whenever you cite any other source, too?

Yes, anything can be misleading or inaccurate. That's not why citation matters. The purpose of citation is so that the reader can refer to the source to see (a) whether the source supports the interpretation you offer; and (b) how the source supports itself.

The second reason (b) is why you should always cite primary sources. The point isn't that primary sources are infallible, but that if they're truly primary sources, they'll support themselves. They'll give examples, evidence, etc. as to why the claims they're making are true, and the reader is then able to evaluate the claims on the basis of the person who originated those claims.

If you cite a secondary source, then you're leading the reader on a trail of citations that might go nowhere. I could cite you, you could cite someone else, that someone else cite yet another person, and off we go. You're essentially setting up a research project for the reader to figure out where the information actually came from.

Also, by the time the information comes through so many people, it can be distorted. It can be like a game of telephone, where what started out as a fact gets interpreted, and the interpretation gets interpreted, and that interpretation gets interpreted, ad nauseam. So by the end, you have no idea how distorted the truth is.

So seriously, if your research paper is relying on certain facts, try to find the original piece of writing that asserted those facts, and read that work for yourself. If you can't do that (in the case of a lost work that no longer exists, but is cited elsewhere), find the source that is as close as possible to the original, and cite that. Always go to the most original point, and always cite the primary work.

Wikipedia is a perfectly good place to start, and luckily they've started to encourage people to cite sources so that you can find the primary source for yourself. So when you want to use a fact from Wikipedia, follow their citation, read the work for yourself, and then you can cite *that* work as your primary source.

Re:This is perfect!

[Z34107]

It would be interesting to have parts of Wikipedia articles "peer reviewed" by Smart Knowledgeable People. Specific versions/revisions of those articles could be tagged as "reputable slash cite-able slash magic."

Then, it could have all the repute of a "hard bound book" and be updated every ten minutes!

Re:This is perfect!

[The_Wilschon]

I have cited wikipedia formally in a quite serious paper (my undergraduate thesis). However, I did not cite it for the information it provided, but merely for its wording. I wanted a pithy quote to open the paper with, and it provided one.

Re:This is perfect!

[Ash.D.Giles]

It depends... when was the scientific text written? Obviously Wikipedia's "No original research" policy means that anything in a wikipedia article will have been written somewhere else first, but accepted theory changes over time, and so does wikipedia. In my mind, it's better to look something up on wikipedia (something outside of my normal field) rather than rely on dusty tomes from the library. Sometimes...

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no need for Wikipedia to be better than dedicated scientific texts and journals. If it's better than other market-leading encyclopedias, that's good enough to ensure its continued dominance. And this is not even taking into account all of Wikipedia's strengths over the other encyclopedias (openness, popularity, ease of update, etc.).

Re:This is perfect!

[exley]

The science articles in wikipedia are better the any other source. Several tests of this have been made. Citation Needed

Re:This is perfect!

[popejeremy]

Anyone can review Wikipedia, but in the real world, only people with spare time and adjendas do review Wikipedia.

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

hell most profession citations are garbage.

Can you cite me a reference for that?

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

in some cases, as in recurrence plots section on wikipedia, the content appears to have been posted by one of the top researchers on the subject. and i bet there's a lot more like this.
  but as we're seeing in wikipedia, the quality of the articles is becoming better every day.

Re:This is perfect!

[bluefoxlucid]

No, in the real world, high level grad students doing research and study read Wikipedia for information, and notice that some of it's wrong. They then feel the urge to correct it in some cases, possibly after verification from their textbook. I've done this.

It's of course a biosphere, just like the economy and government. It naturally converges on an optimal condition, that being that it contains correct information. Britannica can't (it's micro-managed and thus sub-optimal), and scientific review articles are forcibly peer reviewed once (it's micro-managed and thus sub-optimal, but with a much better starting point). The interesting thing about the latter two is that over time they will "become" wrong, i.e. as new scientific discoveries disprove their content; the former, however, will stay "wrong" for a shorter time period.

None of these are perfect. Wikipedia is possibly better than Britannica, worse initially than a peer-reviewed scientific paper (though the data gets incorporated into Wikipedia quickly, with reference), and far better than the Google results many students use on their research assignments (hosted on free Web sites, etc)... though some of those aren't bad either, see http://www.freewebs.com/valvewizard/ (I've even seen Usenet discussions used in FORMAL compsci papers, usually quoting Gutmann).

Re:This is perfect!

[arstchnca]

You claim that Wikipedia can be altered by anyone. This is, on its face, true. However, if the changes are malicious or useless, they won't stay. Try it.

Furthermore, you assert that Wikipedia is not peer reviewed. How can you think this is true? It is constantly reviewed; this is the reason that malicious, useless, and wrong changes aren't retained.

Everyone's an expert.

Re:This is perfect!

[purpleraison]

There are a number of textbooks, particularly with respect to history and politics that contain bias and as such become a part of the annals of history although they may be inaccurate.

Since Wikipedia is peer reviewed from many regions and positions on a topic, it has the advantage of being less biased.

Re:This is perfect!

[Opportunist]

Actually, because of 2. wikipedia already replaced google for me for a lot of searches. The links you get from wikipedia for certain keywords are actually more topical than google's. People play google's search engine to climb to the top, something you can hardly do with wikipedia. You HAVE to be topical to be in the link list there.

Re:This is perfect!

[optikSmoke]

It naturally converges on an optimal condition, that being that it contains correct information

[citation needed]

Re:This is perfect!

[atraintocry]

Absolutely. But the farther you stray from a primary source, the more likely you are to introduce editorial mistakes that are not your own. The best reason not to cite WP is that there's no original research there (supposedly). So everything that's on there you can get more directly, in a version that isn't summarized. Writing essays of any caliber requires that you read the "genuine articles" and form your own opinion.

I'm not going to get into the vulture-editors that circle "their" articles and the legions of bots that do the majority of WP edits, or the notability requirements that somehow don't apply to Pokemon or internet memes.

Anyway, the point is that the closer you can get to someone's original research/writings, the more qualified you are to write about your take on them.

Re:This is perfect!

[atraintocry]

Whoops, hadn't caught nine-times earlier (and better) statement saying the same things. :(

Re:This is perfect!

[optikSmoke]

[...] you assert that Wikipedia is not peer reviewed. [...] It is constantly reviewed

"review" != "peer review". And before you respond:

Everyone's an expert

Let's see what Wikipedia itself has to say:

Peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field

Of course, peer review is not perfect (and some problems with it are handily documented by Wikipedia), but I don't really understand people's insistence that they be able to cite Wikipedia in acamedic situations. Importantly, lack of peer review is not the only reason citing Wikipedia is frowned upon. It has been traditional not to allow citation of encyclopedic sources for a number of reasons. Two pretty common ones off the top of my head:

• An encyclopedia is always a secondary source (hence "no original research"/"citation needed"/etc on wiki); preference for working from the primary source of any research is pretty standard to avoid misinterpretation as the source gets further from the data.
• The audience of an encyclopedia is more general than that of scholarly work; consequently, the information may be summarized or truncated to better reach a wider audience. That process can abstract away details that might be important to researchers but not to laypeople.

So really, why cite Wikipedia? Any information you get from it should be available (probably in more detail) in a source cited by the Wikipedia article. Any information not cited should not be used anyway.

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually they're pretty good, though I once was looking up the volume of the sun, the wikipedia entry was different from the one it referenced (nasa), u should still look at the references.

Re:This is perfect!

[optikSmoke]

I'm not saying it should be a primary source, but not for the reason of "it's an encyclopedia!"

Er, his point was that an encyclopedia is by definition a secondary source, and Wikipedia has policies that are meant to enforce this. When it comes to good research, as has been pointed out above and elsewhere in this discussion, primary sources are preferred for a bunch of reasons (creeping mis-/re-interpretation, citation wild goose chases, etc). Frankly, it doesn't matter how good an article on Wiki is, it should always point you to the primary source which you can read and cite.

Re:This is perfect!

[atraintocry]

Where I feel that Wikipedia falls short are the times when popular opinion is just wrong, or misled. It's hard for one expert to shout down 20 people who think they know better. For a very long time, the WP article on CMYK had a "formula" for converting CMYK to RGB. This formula was not wrong in the sense of being inaccurate. It was simply illogical...it had no basis in reality. The reasons why are subtle and require that someone understand that they're not just numbers -- they represent different and unrelated physical phenomena. But compare the number of color theorists out there with the number of people with photoshop, and you see where the problem creeps in.

To Wikipedia's credit, the thing was finally removed, but I have to wonder how many more of these landmines exist in there. And even though the quality of WP may be going up over time, there are new articles coming in every day as well.

Again, there are those cases where the majority gets it wrong. Wikipedia's only defense against this to wall itself off, which is even worse.

Re:This is perfect!

[Twinbee]

Actually, a citation from Wikipedia is better than none at all. Likewise, a citation from Wikipedia *plus* a citation from a peer reviewed journal is better than the journal alone.

Not citing Wikipedia 'just because', is a bit silly.

Re:This is perfect!

[atraintocry]

Bias is a slippery beast. By its nature it is only visible in the opinions of others. Like how accents are "heard but not spoken". I do agree with your sentiment, but calling WP (or anything) less biased is basically unfalsifiable. How could we be sure? How could we even measure something like that?

Personally, I have some faith in the "marketplace of ideas", but can't forget John Stuart Mill, who not only talked about the "tyranny of the majority" but also insisted that free discourse is only a means to an end -- someone with a wrong idea must come to understand *why* it's wrong, someone with the right idea must understand why that one's right.

What if language itself is biased? :D

Re:This is perfect!

[xPsi]

True, true. But more to the point: Encyclopedias should never be used as primary sources. They have always served only to provide an intellectual foothold into a topic then "springboard" the reader to published references. The idea being that published references have a chain of accountability to experts in various sub-fields, while encyclopedias are merely organized by experts (and experts in organization) -- or, in the case of wikipedia, "anyone" (which seems to do pretty well too).

Re:This is perfect!

[Twinbee]

Speaking on this topic, I notice that there's no CMY article in Wikipedia. Even though in real life, the conversion is inaccurate at best, 'theoretical' CMY is a color model sometimes used in computer graphics, and it would also hold quite well when you combine real life colour filters (e.g. used in stage lighting). It surely would be useful to have this information?

Additionally, with theoretically perfect inks (I know they don't exist, but anyways), would the conversion (now deleted) be valid? Maybe our inks are just not up to the job (and that doesn't mean they wouldn't be in future).

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

The experiment by Nature's editorial staff has been widely criticised as being unfair on Britannica. In any case although the experiment claimed that Wikipedia was more accurate than Britannica the experiment also showed an average of two errors per Wikipedia article. Claims that Wikipedia has quality content are not supported by such a high error rate, especially given the low word count of Wikipedia articles. Readers would be better educated using Google to find an online textbook and skimming its opening explanatory chapter.

I'm a computer science academic. The articles within my field -- computer networking -- are poorly written and usually contain errors. I've tried a few times to correct some most outrageous errors, but they're usually reverted over time. Attempting to fix the poor presentation of the material always leads to instant reversion -- it appears that the "editors" cannot tell the difference between improvement and vandalism but react to any large change to the page.

For example, read the page on "Internet Protocol". There's a huge section on "reliability", although that's a link layer concern with error recovery or retransmission occurring in the transport layer. The fundamental action on IP packets -- their forwarding based on destination address -- is covered in one confusing paragraph labelled "IP addressing and routing" which covers addressing, subnetworking, interior and exterior routing protocols and forwarding in one horrible sentence.

Re:This is perfect!

[Web Goddess]

Wikipedia was a marketplace of ideas in its youth. Nowadays Wikipedia "enforces" citations which means it is much less dynamic, less a marketplace of ideas, and more error-prone. (!) The people who are able to edit successfully, are those who know the system rather than know the topic. Wikipedia was once great. Now it is less dynamic and more error-prone.

From one who regrets the former days of Wiki glory.

Re:This is perfect!

[the phantom]

[blockquote]2) Which is exactly how you should use wikipedia.[/blockquote] Or any encyclopedia, for that matter. The problem is less with Wikipedia itself (though I generally don't trust it all that far for research purposes, and am glad that I have access to a wealth of peer-reviewed work and print encyclopedias through the school district) than it is with any encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are written to be very general references for the lay-person. If you are researching in a field, you really shouldn't need things written for the lay-person -- even at an introductory level, you should be using references from the field that you are studying, whether it be peer-reviewed work, textbooks, or other similar sources. Anyone referencing an encyclopedia past their sophomore or junior year of high school should be told not to in an appropriately strong manner.

Re:This is perfect!

[zegebbers]

It's not the blatantly wrong changes that matter, it's the subtle ones that are difficult for somebody without a lot of specialised knowledge. I've made numerous edits to wikipedia that have been slightly incorrect that have *not* been picked up and have been there for years.

Re:This is perfect!

[AaxelB]

Wikipedia has gone beyond a traditional encyclopedia, though. Both in how many topics it covers, and that detail of information on each topic. It's not beyond a traditional encyclopedia, it's just a much more comprehensive and successful encyclopedia than any that have come before it. Having tons of information doesn't make it "beyond" an encyclopedia, it makes it a better/bigger/more useful encyclopedia.

Re:This is perfect!

[Tim C]

It's of course a biosphere, just like the economy and government. It naturally converges on an optimal condition, that being that it contains correct information.

While I agree that for the most part, and on average, it will converge to have correct information (at least as that is understood by the majority), you're ignoring the short-term damage that malicious individuals can do, especially in less well-visited articles.

Re:This is perfect!

[atraintocry]

I think you're on the right track, but I'll try to elaborate a little based on what I know.

First of all, RGB is device-dependent. Monitors have phosphors that are imperfect, much like the inks are. We use ICC profiles (gamma curves) to tie them back to a standard RGB. Apple uses Apple RGB, Microsoft uses sRGB. On top of this, there are hardware adjustments that the manufacturer makes, as well as the consumer, in both hardware and software. So, to (over)simplify, there is no "RGB"...there's things like sRGB, which attempt to cover as much of the visible spectrum as possible, but do not cover all of it, nor cover any of it "evenly".

CMYK is much the same. It's true that black is necessary because existing C, M, & Y pigments are not "saturated" enough and do not mix to make pure black. Same story: physical limitations, compounded by differences between paper, finishes, where you buy ink from, what chemicals are in it, what sort of press, and on and on. For instance, deep blacks on paper require a glossy finish, same as with monitors. Many device-independent color spaces for CMYK exist as well, one of which is SWOP. It has its own set of assumptions and compromises to go with it. Printers can try to calibrate to this if they want.

Side note: let's say I don't care about any of this, because I'm using mspaint, I'm picking colors by RGB value, and not attaching color profiles to my work. Well, it won't look the same on a Mac...it certainly won't look the same on a printer. Why should I care about the data in the file? About the purity of the theory? At the end of the day, I got three different results for one file, which is unacceptable.

But the main challenges here are that CMYK has a smaller gamut, and there is not in fact one definitive CMYK gamut. Maybe the color space I chose to convert to nailed the blues, but screwed up the reds. Or orange got washed out but not green, and everything that's greyscale is now sort of sepia. We're converting color information between differently weighted, differently compromised systems, then displaying the results on machines that have to be calibrated to match those systems. And we all have different eyes. Someone's gotta decide exactly what blue looks like. Which is why Pantone is used so widely in print. You can avoid all the conversion crap, just tell your printer you want this exact color red, and they'll get as close to it as they can.

Real-world color conversion takes a good eye, as well as knowledge of the black arts. However you get your CMYK "plates" done, they need to preserve that particular piece of work, on a particular printer. Having proofs before you sign off on the print job is very important. You simply cannot trust the math...sometimes a particular conversion will look good, other times it wont.

BUT WAIT! That changed when Wikipedia came out with their magic bullet RGB to CMYK formula version 1.1! None of the mathematical weirdness of LAB and ProPhoto, which have to contain imaginary colors in order to better accommodate the real ones. Here's the secret genius: #00FFFF = Cyan!! #FF00FF = Magenta!! #FFFF00 = Yellow!! #000000 = Black!! Yay! I hope it's clear that putting this information on Wikipedia and calling it a CMYK to RGB formula is about as useful as squagles*. Just because we *call* #0FF cyan, does not mean that it is the same color as printer's cyan (which is really a deep dark blue).

Piano tuning is much the same...all about compromise, balance, unique instruments, having a good ear, and the complete lack of a certain set of pitches that are mathematically in tune with each other. Doesn't exist. Don't ask me why.

* NSFW because of a couple of f-bombs :)

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact you cited Wikipedia twice makes me wary of the validity of your post.

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is not what anybody would reasonably claim, anyway (and I'm sure the GP didn't intend for his claim to be extended to anything except other encyclopaedias, either).

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

not for the reason of "it's an encyclopedia!" No, that's exactly why. Just because Wikipedia is "bigger, better and more detailed" than earlier encyclopedias, the same reasoning is applicable. Hell that just makes it more of an encyclopedia than the previous attempts.

Find the original source, read and interpret it for yourself in the context of your own research, not in the context of an idiots-crash-course-in-whatever.

Re:This is perfect!

[Franso6]

{{fact}}
There. Fixed that for you.

Re:This is perfect!

[JonathanBoyd]

Are you sure you've replied to the correct post? I never stated any opinion concerning the need for Wikiepdia to be better or worse than any particular source. I was simply rebutting the notion that its science articles "are better the any other source."

Incidentally, the strengths it has largely overlap with its weaknesses.

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

2) Which is exactly how you should use _any_ encyclopedia.

Re:This is perfect!

[Paolone]

That's why good universities have guidelines for citing secondary sources (which involves usually a citation of both the primar source and the secondary source where it's been cited).

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right... you should generally never cite an encyclopedia of any kind. What Wikipedia can do very well, and very accurately, is to provide a layer of base knowledge to those who are researching something they know little about (eg students), and often can provide links or bibliography which can be utilized in a proper research paper. I think what most students (at all levels) today are not being taught well is why citation is important, and what research really means. I went to High School and then College almost 20 years ago, but I was fortunate enough to have one English teacher who turned her course into little more than an extended course on creating a proper research paper. She was passionate and specific about research and citation, and really helped instill a respect for that tradition. It's a shame that the question of whether Wikipedia may be cited even comes up, because people should know better.

Re:This is perfect!

[The_Wilschon]

Textbooks are, in general, not primary sources themselves.

Re:This is perfect!

[sm62704]

Better yet, if your teacher won't let you use wikipedia, use Uncyclopedia.

Re:This is perfect!

[sm62704]

It is about as useful as citing a dictionary.

If you're arguing about the meaning or the spelling of a word, what else would you cite?

I went to public school; I think there's an Illinois state law that says you can't be a teacher unless you rode the short bus when you went to school. My mon's dictionary was invaluable when a teacher thought I made up the word Hierarchy" and it wasn't in her abridged dictionary. It changed an F to a B+.

A science teacher gave me an A on a paper I wrote on physics because he couldn't understand it. No way he would have understood anything cited by wikipedia, he probably would have had trouble with an encyclopedia.

The link to "Hierarchy" is there on the off chance that the old bitch is not only still alive but reading slashdot as well.

Re:This is perfect!

[sm62704]

In MAJOR articles like those on neuroscience, biology, core computer science, mathematics, etc, Wikipedia tends to contain fewer inaccuracies per text unit than Britannica

And in some articles, like those on Klingons, Thiotimoline, Flux Capacitors, Pink Floyd Discographies, etc. Britannica doesn't even have an entry at all!

Re:This is perfect!

[sm62704]

A challenge for you: make a change to wikipedia that is blatantly wrong and have it stay for 24 hours.

That is also one of wikipedia's weaknesses. Make a change to wikipedia that is correct and it, too is likely to be changed in 24 hours.

To wikipedia's credit, however, things usually sort themselves out. I made a change to its entry on cataracts after having my CrystaLens IOL implanted in '06, mentioning this medical breakthrough, and it was excised in far less than 24 hours. Someone else managed to undo the undoing months later and it has the info I added, only written more clearly.

Re:This is perfect!

[wile_e_wonka]

I don't think much of this matters anyway--you aren't supposed to cite to Britannica either in research (or any other encyclopedia). That's one reason I like Wikipedia so much--just like Britannica, they just give the facts to send you in the right direction, but for free and on many more topics. Encyclopedias just help us to know what we should be looking up. This is why Wikipedia is much, much more valuable when people cite their sources.

Re:This is perfect!

[sm62704]

...calling WP (or anything) less biased is basically unfalsifiable. How could we be sure? How could we even measure something like that?

Personally, I have some faith in the "marketplace of ideas",

Move over, Spagetti Monster, we gots us a new religion!

Re:This is perfect!

[evilbessie]

Or you can get circular logic as happened recently IIRC, where the 'references' in the article were based on sources which came from the article, so it was effectively referencing itself in the past. You don't get that with citing the top of the tree.

Re:This is perfect!

[T-Bone-T]

Now that we know that "peer review" is done by experts in the same field and it has been established that Wikipedia is NOT peer reviewed, how does Wikipedia block experts from viewing articles in their field and why would it purposefully limit its credibility in that way?

Re:This is perfect!

[skarphace]

Bias is a slippery beast. By its nature it is only visible in the opinions of others. Like how accents are "heard but not spoken".

I disagree on both of your examples. Are you saying you can not notice when something is biased, even when it supports your personal bias? It only takes a little bit of third party 'viewing' by yourself to notice this. Also, you've never heard anyone imitate a southern accent that was not from the south?

Re:This is perfect!

[john83]

(I've even seen Usenet discussions used in FORMAL compsci papers, usually quoting Gutmann)

I've seen this too. One example is reference ten in the following:
Johnson, S.G., Frigo, M., "A Modified Split-Radix FFT with Fewer Arithmetic Operations", IEEE Trans. Sig. Proc. 55, 111-119 (2007).

It was used there to establish a time line as much as anything, but I was still surprised to see it in an IEEE journal.

Re:This is perfect!

[AhtirTano]

There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia that can't happen in any hard bound book.

I've never opened a hard-bound physics textbook and found that it consists only of a anatomy textbook's diagram of the female reproductive organs. I've had this happen on Wikipedia.

Re:This is perfect!

[optikSmoke]

how does Wikipedia block experts from viewing articles in their field and why would it purposefully limit its credibility in that way?

While you're probably just being facetious, I probably should have been clearer. Obviously Wikipedia doesn't "block experts" or whatever, the point is that peer review is a specific process which Wikipedia does not use.

As to the question of "limiting credibility", I would say it's more that they have a specific goal: to be the best encyclopedia (this is refelected by policies such as "No Original Research"). Inherent in that goal is that citation of Wikipedia would be frowned upon in academic circles, just like citation of any other encyclopedia. I guess you could re-cast that as a limitation on credibility, but I would be more inclined to say that they are seeking a certain type of credibility: that of an encyclopedia.

Re:This is perfect!

[optikSmoke]

I was aware of the irony :)

Re:This is perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a dick.

Re:This is perfect!

[John Meacham]

Indeed, which is why wikipedia encourages/requires citations to those dedicated scientific texts and journals. But when it comes to math and science, wikipedia is generally an excellent place to start.

Re:This is perfect!

[bane2571]

I guess it's an equilibrium, eventually the facts approach true but they swing either side of it for a variable amount of time. This is more evident in a high energy (controversial) situation.

Re:This is perfect!

[atraintocry]

You definitely can notice it, and it's my sincere hope that most people will exercise the will-power necessary to reasonably examine themselves.

Rather, I was trying to get at the idea that there isn't any test which which you could sweep Wikipedia and then conclude, "OK, that's the last of 'em, no biases here."

I obviously don't trust myself to see into every situation with perfect insight, but I don't trust WP there either because, for one thing, how would you know?

Sponsored Links

[negRo_slim]

You'd think you would re brand the mirror if your trying to pull in ad revenue from the retarded masses ;)

Dupe

[Lev13than]

C'mon people - this story is a dupe. I just saw the exact same discussion on e-slashdot.org!

Re:Dupe

[monxrtr]

Don't physicists just call these macro examples of parallel universes? There must be some cross over platforms, such as through black holes, or dupe websites. But only pirate space craft can reach the FTL (faster than lawsuit) speed necessary to access the content.

Re:Dupe

[squidfood]

Don't physicists just call these macro examples of parallel universes?

Yes. On e-slashdot, CowboyNeal has a goatee.

Re:Dupe

[bugnuts]

If I wasn't at e-work and had some time, I'd put up that site with this story.

Re:Dupe

[bugnuts]

CowboyNeal has a goatee You spelled that wrong, and forgot the .cx

Re:Dupe

[Rogerborg]

And if I wasn't poor and ugly, I'd be dating Alyson Hannigan. Life's a bitch, isn't it?

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

And if I wasn't poor and ugly, I'd be dating Alyson Hannigan. And that she's married, and not just on TV...

Re:Dupe

[Gideon Fubar]

yeah, to Alexis Denisof of all people.

It's like a teenage Buffy fanfic. Scary.

Re:Dupe

[DriedClexler]

LOL! (literally)
Link actually works! e-slashdot.org --> x2 LOL!
Link actually does the same thing that e-wikipedia does to wikipedia --> x3 LOL!
Score:6, Funny.

Re: Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Elsewhere:
  by Titoxd (1116095) on Thursday June 19, @05:42PM (#23865187) Homepage
It's funny, but you have to consider that the site is a live mirror [wikipedia.org] of Wikipedia. So, they are using Wikipedia's content, through Wikipedia's servers, and then serving ads and spam on top of them. These get nuked by the Wikimedia server administrators quickly.

---

So how long before e-slashdot.org gets nuked?

What!?

[Aussenseiter]

You mean... someone is taking information freely available on the internet and claiming it as their own for profit reasons? My word, what a shocking turn of events!

Re:What!?

[Titoxd]

It's funny, but you have to consider that the site is a live mirror of Wikipedia. So, they are using Wikipedia's content, through Wikipedia's servers, and then serving ads and spam on top of them. These get nuked by the Wikimedia server administrators quickly.

Re:What!?

[David Gerard]

And live feeds are in fact a service the WMF sells. Because they cost!

Re:What!?

[One Childish N00b]

Remind me again when being an internet pornographer became a bad thing?

Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters

[gardyloo]

Yeah! Weren't those the days? There were an awful lot of "CmdrTaco wins Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Peace, and Chemistry" posts, though.

Don't log in..

[aephoenix]

It could be a phishing attempt to.. sucks for the OP. :s

Re:Don't log in..

[skelly33]

Aww now you tell me. There goes all my personal banking information that I normally keep safe and sound on the REAL wikipedia site. :(

Re:Don't log in..

[Repton]

I tried that, but my bank account details failed the notability criteria..

It's no sin

[Eco-Mono]

The sauce is under GFDL. E-Wikipedia is also under GFDL. I don't see the problem.

Re:It's no sin

[paulthomas]

I do not think that the GFDL covers trade marks and trade-dress. A default install of MediaWiki (the open-source engine behind Wikipedia) shows a generic logo with a text description of how to change it to your own.

E-wikipedia.net uses the Wikipedia logo, which would require the explicit permission of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Re:It's no sin

[LiquidCoooled]

I doubt its the content, but the passing themselves off as if they are wikipedia.
Thats phishing in my book and very wrong.

Re:It's no sin

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding... this is exactly what "free as in speach" (libre) means...

Re:It's no sin

[Eco-Mono]

Whoops, forgot about that. Yeah, they're gonna have some problems.

Re:It's no sin

[Skylinux]

Still needs some work, when I click on your logo link I get a leecher warning. Problem is the warning still has the original Wikipedia.org link in it .... stupid thieves.

Leech (computing)
Access denied: remote loader detected.

This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.

A remote loader is a website that loads content from another site on each request. The content is typically filtered, framed with ads, and then displayed to the user.

The remote loader either:
Pretends to be the source website, perhaps using a deceptive domain name; or
Converts all instances of the name of the source website to some other name.

We consider remote loading websites to be an unfair drain on our server resources, and so they are systematically blocked, as this one has been.

Re:It's no sin

[mutube]

Still needs some work, when I click on your logo link I get a leecher warning. Problem is the warning still has the original Wikipedia.org link in it .... stupid thieves.

What you're reading is coming from the real Wikipedia.org site. The fake e-wikipedia.net simply passes requests through to the real site and returns the result to the user. Now it's been detected and blocked on the Wikipedia.org side, with this message (including the link to the real Wikipedia) being sent for every request.

(*You may already know this, it just sounded like you didn't. Apologies if I got the wrong end of the stick)

Re:It's no sin

[Eco-Mono]

This is new within the last thirty minutes. When I posted the link, it was working.

Let me guess...

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Brought to you by the creators of Limbo of the Lost.

S[cp]ammer alert?

[Antony T Curtis]

I noticed when I scrolled down to the bottom of the "e-wikipedia"'s clone of the About page, there was some junk words at the bottom which were not on the original.

The site is probably just a reverse proxy with a few filters to insert ads, maybe embed malicious content, insert some junk text, white on white, and the site owners probably hope that when people are looking for info using a search engine, that they will mistake the site for the real Wikipedia.

1. Create a Fake-e-pedia site
2. ????
3. Profit!!!

I wonder what their #2 is...

Just my 2cents.

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[StarReaver]

Wait for the ad revenues to roll in.

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[oahazmatt]

The site is probably just a reverse proxy with a few filters to insert ads, maybe embed malicious content, insert some junk text, white on white, and the site owners probably hope that when people are looking for info using a search engine, that they will mistake the site for the real Wikipedia. Yeah, but like the real Wikipedia, can this one survive the Slashdot effect? Let's find out!

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[skelly33]

If they were smart, #2 would be some sort of HTTP proxy that eliminates the need for replicating the content and functions; they could just be a man-in-the-middle and insert ads rather inconspicuously and even rewrite URLS for media assets to go to the original site to control bandwidth costs. I've done similar things as part of a CDN migration process for a set of sites pushing over 700Mb/s and it seems to work well enough.

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[PastaAnta]

I wonder what their #2 is... 2. Get your worthless site mentioned in an article on slashdot containing numerous links ...

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[Shivetya]

#2. Get posted to Slashdot and Digg...

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[saskboy]

You took the words out of my mouth!

Good thing I use Adblock :-)

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[Anonymous Coward]

Access denied: remote loader detected.

This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.

A remote loader is a website that loads content from another site on each request. The content is typically filtered, framed with ads, and then displayed to the user.

The remote loader either:

        * Pretends to be the source website, perhaps using a deceptive domain name; or
        * Converts all instances of the name of the source website to some other name.

We consider remote loading websites to be an unfair drain on our server resources, and so they are systematically blocked, as this one has been.

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like 2. Don't get sued. 3. PROFIT!

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be really easy to track down, since all the users getting those assets would have the referrer from the malicious site.

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[ELProphet]

The site is probably just a reverse proxy with a few filters to insert ads, maybe embed malicious content, insert some junk text, white on white, and the site owners probably hope that when people are looking for info using a search engine, that they will mistake the site for the real Wikipedia. Yeah, but like the real Wikipedia, can this one survive the Slashdot effect? Let's find out! Nope. Wikipedia already cut their access. This is an awesome new form of slashdotting...

1. Proxy someone else's site
2. Add Ads
3. Slashdot
4. Owners of original site block your IP from theirs.
5. NO Profit!

No ??? needed.

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[Anonymous Coward]

#2 is: Get on /.

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I prefer www.rickipedia.net as a fake-e-pedia site. And yes you will probably get rick-rolled but you'll have fun doing it.

Re:S[cp]ammer alert?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what their #2 is...

Their #2 is to improve on the idea of Wikipedia. I mean, look at the name: e-wikipedia.net. It's so much better than the original because this one's electronic!

Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not really...
Just be glad it hasn't had the same awful fate as digg and reddit....

p0wnd

[Anonymous Coward]

"Just try logging in or actually editing an article, though, and you'll get the message"... thx 4 ur l/p. we pwn ur a$$. ktxhbye

but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't see a reason for this at all, maybe to make a little bit of cash but all the hardcore wiki people are not gonna click on any of the add's

Curl Script

[Shimdaddy]

I got this: Warning: "curl_error(): 1 is not a valid cURL handle resource in /home/rocky/domains/e-wikipedia.net/public_html/1.php on line 193" when trying to get a random page. Obviously Rocky has a pretty smart business model for keeping his content up to date...

Wiki* ...Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

[Zymergy]

So each blatantly duped entry has the following text right below it (or something similar): "...Brought to you by Carl's Jr."?

Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[Spy der Mann]

1. That site will sooner or later be indexed by Google, misleading unwary googlers to the fake site.
2. More hits, more ad revenue.
3. Profit!!

Hopefully, Wikipedia's GFDL license will make possible to have this website banned.

Re:Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[JustinOpinion]

Except that #2 (and therefore #3) is rather unlikely.

If this new site doesn't provide anything above-and-beyond what Wikipedia provides, then few people will link to it, and its PageRank will be low. Without ranking high on Google, no one will find the site, and their ad revenue will be pathetic.

So, I don't really understand their business model here. Unless they offer some "value added" over the normal Wikipedia (quicker load times, vetted articles, better search, etc.), then they can't hope to attract eyeballs to their adds.

Forking is fine. A crappy fork, however, won't attract interest, and won't last long.

Re:Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[roaddemon]

"Few people will link to it" - except for the priceless publicity it just got through /.

Re:Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[stephanruby]

So, I don't really understand their business model here.

You don't need to understand their business model. Sometimes the first thing people do is cut and paste content from a site onto their own web site to use as some kind of place holder. It doesn't mean they're going to make any money on this. Sometimes, the people that try to set up online businesses are just twelve year old kids, or they're people that have just gotten on the web six months ago.

Search engines actually penalize web sites with duplicate content. They don't penalize the original web site, they penalize the site that's trying do the copying. And in the case of Google if you use Google's anti-spyware reputation thingy, and if someone copies an entire site wholesale like they seems to have done, that web site will most likely show up as a suspicious phishing/spyware/trojan web site, and it will continue to have such a tarnished reputation even six months after -- its content has been updated not to be a copy anymore.

Re:Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[Opportunist]

Yes, but this is /. This means two things:

First, that there are no links except maybe the one in the original posting. You have to do all the pesky a href html thingamajig instead of just doing a [url], too much hassle for most to link to a page they don't like.

And second, by tomorrow, nobody will even remember this story existed.

Re:Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[TheLink]

"And second, by tomorrow, nobody will even remember this story existed"

That's when we get a dupe right? :)

Re:Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[Opportunist]

Huh? What's a dupe? :)

Re:Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[netsharc]

I think Google has indexed it, it happened to me the other day, the Google result page said "$FOO - Wikipedia", I clicked on it and noticed the somewhat broken layout, and then finally I noticed the URL said e-wikipedia.net .. dang.

Re:Google advertising revenue, most probably.

[Maestro4k]

So, I don't really understand their business model here. Unless they offer some "value added" over the normal Wikipedia (quicker load times, vetted articles, better search, etc.), then they can't hope to attract eyeballs to their adds.

Wikipedia's blocked their pulling pages dynamically but you can still see the real business plan on the site. Check out the very bottom of the page. See all those links? That's the real prize, they were doing a dynamic mirror of Wikipedia so they'd have lots and lots of unique articles to toss spam links on. All those pages linking to the spam sites would help raise those sites page rank, or at least make it more likely people searching for something would run across them.

Basically, just a slightly more creative spammer. Instead of trying to spam their links to forums/shoutboxes/etc. they were pulling the content to them and tagging on their links instead.

Sorry but

[Anonymous Coward]

1. It's the GFDL, not the Gnu Documentation Free License,

2. This is not a violation of the GFDL, it's a trademark issue. You cannot just claim to be Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About ).

Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plagiarising both a source and destination of plagiarism. Oh, bitter irony, how I hate thee!

Started a new article...

[oahazmatt]

Interesting.

I was already logged into Wikipedia. I went to e-wiki, and did a search for itself. I decided I'd have some fun and create the article. I clicked to create it, and it brought me over to en.wikipedia.org to create it.

Very interesting. Not even -trying- for original content.

whoisGuard

[jrathe89]

This comment will not be saved until you click the Submit button below. You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later. To confirm you're not a script,

The most

[Kingston]

comprehensive and informative link farm on the net.

Cry me a river...

[UnknownSoldier]

I'm getting tired of people bitching about this or that license. Oh noes! Someone is making a buck from shared & public information. What else is new. People will always abuse any principle.

Since the site is _dependent_ on wikipedia for the information in the first place, the real "value" is the contributors, not some artificial one, and as a contributor, that is the main thing to me: guaranteeing that the information will stay free for everyone. if i was concerned about someone "ripping" the info off, I wouldn't contribute in the first place.

--
"Wikipedia is proof that that you can take the people out of politics, but you you can't take the politics out of people"

Re:Cry me a river...

[David Gerard]

It's not the content, it's the live leeching. Mirrors are supposed to use the database dumps (now that those are updating more frequently *cough*).

There are hundreds/thousands of such sites

[quarrel]

There are many many many of these sites.

While I notice it hasn't in this case, google is normally pretty quick to remove them from its indexes as well, so if you use google, you'll mostly not be able to find them.

However, the basic meme of copy content, add ads and publish, particularly for content like wikipedia that is self-referential, is very widely used.

--Q

It appears to be permitted

[DRJlaw]

This does nothing to resolve the trademark problem that the 'mirror' creates, but it is instructive to look at the actual text of the license.

"2. Verbatim Copying [] You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License."

The pages do appear to be verbatim copies of the Wikipedia pages, despite the lack of some images (note: verbatim - in precisely the same words used by a writer or speaker). You'll also note that the license does not require attribution (found in other words in Section 4), just a requirement for reproduction. Wikipedia is the one that must resolve its failure to include a copyright notice on the pages, not the mirror.

Re:It appears to be permitted

[gnarlyhotep]

Excepting that wikipedia has gotten a rep as playing fast and loose with copyright laws in the first place. Isn't there a provision in the gdfl that requires adequate attribution to the author? When something is deleted/oversighted/otherwise removed completely, and then reinserted later by another author, does that not violate the copyright of the original contributor?

Point being: if wikipedia did include such copyright notices, they'd have to be a lot more careful with their bookwork regarding contributions, especially those of editors banned from the site who lack the ability to look after the contributions themselves. As far as I can tell, they've avoided any such notification for the sole purpose of avoiding any and all legal entanglements.

Re:It appears to be permitted

[Titoxd]

At the bottom of every page:

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Additionally, all the pages Wikipedia deals with are modified versions of prior GFDL'd documents, so Section 4 of the GFDL (Modifications) and all of its attribution requirements apply. While the GFDL is an awful license to use in a wiki, lack of attribution requirements is not one of those reasons.

Re:It appears to be permitted

[Veinor]

Actually, when an article is deleted and then undeleted, the original author still maintains attribution.

Re:It appears to be permitted

[DRJlaw]

Additionally, all the pages Wikipedia deals with are modified versions of prior GFDL'd documents, so Section 4 of the GFDL (Modifications) and all of its attribution requirements apply.

I think that there's a reasonable argument that the requirements of Section 4 of the GFDL do not apply to the mirror. At the very least, if you argue that the mirror has violated the GFDL then you're arguing that Wikipedia has violated the GFDL. If I had to defend the mirror in court, I can virtually guarantee that I would argue that the copyright holder had waived the requirements of the GFDL that were not being followed by Wikipedia, and that the mirror lacked any obligation to affirmatively comply with the requirements of Section 4 versus Section 2 of the GFDL.

My essential point in replying to the article is that Wikipedia is the one responsible for any violations of the GFDL. It would be essentially impossible for it to assert that the mirror had violated whatever copyright it might hold in that material.

Re:It appears to be permitted

[BPPG]

My opinion is this: Plagiarism is not copyright infringement. While both terms may apply to a particular act, they are different transgressions. Copyright infringement is a violation of the rights of a copyright holder, when material protected by copyright is used without consent. On the other hand, plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship.

I wrote all of that myself, in case you weren't sure. Honest.

Re:It appears to be permitted

[Titoxd]

I guess l don't understand why Wikipedia would be violating the GFDL (or violating contributors' copyright) to begin with. The violation of the mirror is less a copyright issue than it is a "you're using my server to do your dirty work" issue. In case it helps, there's A bunch of notices mentioning the GFDL every time you mention a page.

Re:It appears to be permitted

[BPPG]

Okay, I was going for a funny here. Whoever modded me Insightful: here, third paragraph from the top.

WHOIS information

[Anonymous Coward]

Archived WHOIS on e-wikipedia.net domain from 2008/04/27 (it's now using a privacy protect WHOIS service):

Registration Service Provided By: NameCheap.com
Contact: support@NameCheap.com
Visit: http://www.namecheap.com/

Domain name: e-wikipedia.net

Registrant Contact:
      -
      John Heys (allegro.share2@o2.pl)
      +46.0851041152
      Fax: +1.5555555555
      Virkesvagen 5
      Stockholm, n/a 12030
      SE

Administrative Contact:
      -
      John Heys (allegro.share2@o2.pl)
      +46.0851041152
      Fax: +1.5555555555
      Virkesvagen 5
      Stockholm, n/a 12030
      SE

Technical Contact:
      -
      John Heys (allegro.share2@o2.pl)
      +46.0851041152
      Fax: +1.5555555555
      Virkesvagen 5
      Stockholm, n/a 12030
      SE

Status: Locked

Name Servers:
      ns1.hostpower.pl
      ns2.hostpower.pl

Creation date: 28 Feb 2008 20:23:45
Expiration date: 28 Feb 2009 20:23:45

---

Other domains hosted at that IP:

Strzelecki.info
E-teledyski.org
Giexx.com
Moderowany.net
Songstexts.info
Tibianews.info
Wartibia.com
Wikipedia2009.com
Axeee.com

I'll spare everyone the WHOIS data for all of those domains as well - look it up on your own. :-)

Ripping Off Wikipedia

[EEPROMS]

Diary of a blonde super criminal [insert pathetic MUAWAHAHAH here]

1. Make counterfeit dimes.
2. Buy SCO shares then sue everyone...eer again
3. Copy Wikipedia

Re:Ripping Off Wikipedia

[BPPG]

must be blonde. There was no "4. PROFIT!"

Anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a high school student turn in a long report that obviously wasn't her work. I googled it and she had cut and pasted about 10 pages of material right from Wikipedia into her report. I brought her in, told her that some of the writing didn't look like she wrote it:

Me: "Did you write this whole thing yourself?"
Her: "Yes, of course!"
Me: "Are you sure"
Her: "Yes, 100%"
Me: "Well, a huge chunk of your report is straight from Wikipedia."
Her: "Um, yeah, well, um I wrote that Wikipedia page."

Re:Anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I can top that, I once had a teacher accuse me of copying from Wikipedia. Only I was able to point to the page history and log into my account to prove that I had in fact written the article

Re:Anonymous coward

[RealGrouchy]

I also wrote a report that was copied off of Wikipedia. To cover my tracks, I wrote a Wikipedia article about my report which said that I was the author!

- RG>

Re:Anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Worth proving her a liar by going back through the revision history?

If she *did* write it, extra credit.

I would put the odds at 1 in 10,000 though, not even knowing the people involved.

Re:Anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I ran into a similar situation (from the other end), but I *did* in fact write all of the text of the page in question. (One editor added some pictures and fixed a misdirected link, another fixed a typo, and a third changed the format for the reference section. It was also vandalized once by an unregistered user.) The teacher gave me credit for the assignment, and learned how to read Wikipedia's article histories.

Re:Anonymous coward

[quantaman]

I had a high school student turn in a long report that obviously wasn't her work. I googled it and she had cut and pasted about 10 pages of material right from Wikipedia into her report. I brought her in, told her that some of the writing didn't look like she wrote it:

Me: "Did you write this whole thing yourself?"
Her: "Yes, of course!"
Me: "Are you sure"
Her: "Yes, 100%"
Me: "Well, a huge chunk of your report is straight from Wikipedia."
Her: "Um, yeah, well, um I wrote that Wikipedia page." Slightly OT but that reminds me of a classmate back in high school.

We had to write a report on something, I don't recall what, but the teacher felt the submitted work was somewhat above the writing level of that particular student and questioned its originality. When the student defended their authorship then teacher than preceded to inquire about the passage of the report where the student claimed 20 years of research in the field.

Re:Anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe she did?

In 6th grade I got an "F" on a school photography project because my teacher claimed I never turned anything, since she didn't have it. I claimed she lost it but, of course, lost that argument.

My grade was changed later when the picture was "found": as our school's entry in the County art faire.

That was when I realized teachers were idiots.

Re:Anonymous coward

[mdmkolbe]

In some contexts this may still be plagiarism. Self plagiarism to be precise. In academic publications it is a big deal, though most wouldn't be too worried about student reports and Wikipedia entries.

Re:Anonymous coward

[PhxBlue]

How do we know you didn't write that piece on self-plagiarism? :)

Re:Anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they'd obviously put in overtime.

Re:Anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

When the student defended their authorship then teacher than preceded to inquire about the passage of the report where the student claimed 20 years of research in the field.

You should proceed to this question, not precede your accusation with it.

Re:Anonymous coward

[quantaman]

When the student defended their authorship then teacher than preceded to inquire about the passage of the report where the student claimed 20 years of research in the field.

You should proceed to this question, not precede your accusation with it.

One of several side-effects of being late for work and rushing to post.

Re:Anonymous coward

[itwasgreektome]

That's awesome. I would love to see the look on a teacher's face when that came to light...

Re:Anonymous coward

[LihTox]

Off the top of my head, I can think of three cases where self-plagiarism is a problem:
1) a researcher publishes the same work several times, inflating his publication record;
2) the researcher transferred the copyright to the original journal, so by self-plagiarizing he is violating copyright;
3) a student turns in the same paper for more than one class, getting double credit for the same work.

If the student writes a paper for a class, and then submits the work to Wikipedia at the same time as she submits it in class, I see nothing wrong with that except for the burden of proving that it wasn't plagiarized. If she wrote the article for Wikipedia a long time ago, then that might be questionable...most teachers want students to write papers in the context of the current class, I think.

In any case, any student who does this without checking with the teacher is asking for trouble; some teachers/professors can be very touchy about the Net, particularly if they don't understand it very well. At the least, the student had better be sure that she makes all her edits while logged in, so that she can prove her authorship later.

Re:Anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Still 'self-'plagiarism if you don't attribute yourself, I am afraid.

Sue for trademark infringement.

[Pendersempai]

Just because you can use the content doesn't mean you can use the name. Go after them for trademark infringement and take all their earth moneys.

Interlibrary loan latency; standard dictionaries

[tepples]

Have you considered using the references that are linked by Wikipedia instead? Yes, but an interlibrary loan would take longer than the instructor has given for the project.

It is about as useful as citing a dictionary. Some fields of study depend on the precise meanings of words and have adopted a set of standard dictionaries. For example, law in the United States uses Black's Law Dictionary, falling back to Merriam-Webster for any other words.

in related news

[Quadraginta]

Next up, the /. community discovers that notions like copyright, meaning the right of a work's creator to control how it's copied and distributed, is not such a bad idea after all.

Circular Reference

[s7uar7]

If someone references e-wikipedia.net in an article on Wikipedia will the internet collapse in on itself?

Re:Circular Reference

[Surt]

I just tried, and everything seems +++ NO CARRIER.

Re:Circular Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

I created a page for e-wikipedia. The WikiGnomes tagged it within five minutes as a non-notable web site; the article has been speedy deleted now... twice.

WhoisGuard

[Anonymous Coward]

whom ever they are there using WhoisGuard and do not want people knowing who they are......what are they hiding, i think there could be something malicious behind this...

Well, they do have attribution

[91degrees]

It's not like there's any question at all that this material comes from Wikipedia, or that they're trying to hide it this fact.

Seriously though, while what they're doing is pretty worthless and generally poor manners, I'm not going to get too riled up about it. Hopefully it will just cease to exist when the owners realise that nobody wants to visit.

Registrant

[anthonys_junk]

Interesting, seems like someone wants to remain anonymous. /><br />

Registrant:
WhoisGuard
WhoisGuard Protected
8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 - 732

Westchester CA, 90045 US

Administrative:
WhoisGuard
WhoisGuard Protected
8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 - 732

Westchester CA, 90045 US
Phone: +1.6613102107
Fax: +1.6613102107

Technical:
WhoisGuard
WhoisGuard Protected
8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 - 732

Westchester CA, 90045 US
Phone: +1.6613102107
Fax: +1.6613102107

nameserver:
NS2.TROOL.PL
NS1.TROOL.PL

updated-date: 2008-05-30 15:41:50.000

created-date: 2008-02-28 20:23:45.000

registration-expiration-date: 2009-02-28 20:23:45.000

status:
registrar-lock

domain: e-wikipedia.net

Re:Registrant

[Icegryphon]

BayTSP does the same crap. yet they try to track down the anonymous. ironic isn't it?

WhoisGuard

[jrathe89]

whom ever they are there useing WhoisGuard and do not want people knowing who they are......what are they hiding. I think there is something malicious behind this...

Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Clear Trademark Violation.

[plasmacutter]

This sounds like a clear case for trademark violation.

This is very different than copying/mirroring content, it is intentionally trying to confuse/deceive people as to which is the real site.

I sincerely hope wikimedia files suit.

Nuked

[OverlordQ]

A simple notice to a dev/admin would of taken care of this a long time ago.

Re:Nuked

[OverlordQ]

Well that shoulda been: irc://irc.freenode.org/wikimedia-tech

<Splarka> I clicked http://e-wikipedia.net/w/en/Special:Random and it's trying to load [[Leech_(computing)]] but not having much success
<Splarka> > Access denied: remote loader detected.
<Splarka> <3
<brion> sorry folks, i ruined your fun
<OverlordQ> awww

Remote Loading/Leeching

[JustinOpinion]

If you try and access it now, it displays this:

Leech (computing)

Access denied: remote loader detected. This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.

A remote loader is a website that loads content from another site on each request. The content is typically filtered, framed with ads, and then displayed to the user.

The remote loader either:

• Pretends to be the source website,perhaps using a deceptive domain name; or
• Converts all instances of the name of the source website to some other name.

We consider remote loading websites to be an unfair drain on our server resources, and so they are systematically blocked, as this one has been.

So, obviously this site was fetching Wikipedia content in real-time, and sticking in ads and whatnot (rather than using their own local copy of the Wikipedia database). This is obviously a silly drain on Wikipedia's servers.

Moreover, this is a stupid way to design it, since it's trivial for Wikipedia to detect what you're doing, and serve a custom error page, as they have done. In short, why did these people assume Wikipedia was going to let them continue infringing their trademark and taxing their servers?

Re:Remote Loading/Leeching

[Tom]

Because it took how long until this was noticed? They almost certainly made their domain-registration fee back and then some.

Short-living business strategies work, if you chain them together.

Re:Remote Loading/Leeching

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

Actually, Wikipedia relies on editors to find pages themselves; the detection is far from automatic. I'm assuming that at least 1 Slashdot reader knew what to do in this case, and let the Wikimedia Foundation know about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks#Remote_loading

Re:Remote Loading/Leeching

[multipartmixed]

Maybe this is just the first stage, and they are working on a way to fetch pages through Tor.

Re:Remote Loading/Leeching

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also incredibly stupid when Wikipedia has SQL dumps up for download.

Re:Remote Loading/Leeching

[assassinator42]

If you look at this list linked from the page the previous poster mentioned, you'll see several of these "mirrors" do fetch pages through open proxies.

Re:Remote Loading/Leeching

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the donate page, it's not displaying that error.

Re:Remote Loading/Leeching

[ergo98]

In short, why did these people assume Wikipedia was going to let them continue infringing their trademark and taxing their servers?

I imagine that it's one guy who spent maybe a couple of hours for this "product", not some corporation with a team of developers.

This isn't even a copy

[RTofPA]

When I did a search on it, it returned a "leech" message. Obviously,they didn't even bother to copy it, as far as I can tell, they are just returning wikipedia pages. In fact, the page it returned specifically warned me only to use pages from *.wikipedia.org and that this site was leeching off them. If your going to try something like this, you should at least not be a total idiot, to the point where your copy actually points out that it is fake.

Re:This isn't even a copy

[ta bu shi da yu]

If they screen-scraped, they would be have been blocked as this means that they didn't honor Wikipedia's Robots.txt file.

Basically, they have tried to be clever and they take the incoming request for an article, then they pass it to the Wikipedia servers, scrape back the content and repackage it in a form that allows ads.

Thus, because they don't want to fork out money for a database dump and setup Mediawiki, they have been blocked.

I guess it sucks to be cheap.

Oh, and before you say that they didn't realise it was a bad thing - I'd just like to point out that a whois of e-wikipedia.net returns a whoisguard entry. Positively guaranteed to be a dodgy site.

Maybe we need a whois phishing filter built into Firefox. If you register your DNS names with certain registrars, then the filter looks up the name via whois. If it's dodgy, warn the end user.

Evil Genius!

[RingDev]

Step 1) Duplicate highly successful web site, rip off all content, images, layouts, etc...
Step 2) Secure Advertising
Step 3) Submit story on /. and Digg about rampant abuse of IP
Step 4) Profit!

-Rick

Re:Evil Genius!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick. Patent the business model and then you can sue anyone who tries to copy your method.

Re:Evil Genius!

[BPPG]

We shall call it the Reverse-Streisand effect.

Re:Evil Genius!

[aggemam]

-Rick ... Astley?

Re:Evil Genius!

[Anonymous Coward]

failure.

correct meme is:

Step 1) Duplicate highly successful web site, rip off all content, images, layouts, etc...
Step 2) Secure Advertising
Step 3) Submit story on /. and Digg about rampant abuse of IP
Step 4) ????
Step 5) Profit!

lern2meme
plz

Re:Evil Genius!

[miruku]

jeez, are people never gonna give that up?

Wikipedia has taken action already.

[PhilTheRed]

This is what I get now from http://e-wikipedia.net/

Leech (computing) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Access denied: remote loader detected.

This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.

A remote loader is a website that loads content from another site on each request. The content is typically filtered, framed with ads, and then displayed to the user.

The remote loader either: * Pretends to be the source website, perhaps using a deceptive domain name; or * Converts all instances of the name of the source website to some other name.

We consider remote loading websites to be an unfair drain on our server resources, and so they are systematically blocked, as this one has been.

I tend to agree.

[plasmacutter]

So long as it doesn't do horrible things to peoples' computers, I don't see an issue here.

In fact, I think theyre doing the wikimedia foundation a huge favor by providing bandwidth to a comprehensive mirror. (wikimedia doesn't make very much despite the traffic because they have an ideological dislike for ads, no matter how uninvasive).

Let the site live, keep an eye on it, and if it turns out to be spreading malware/used for nefarious purposes, then swat it fast and hard with the trademark bat.

Re:I tend to agree.

[Tangent128]

Except that they aren't mirroring it; they fetch the information off of wikipedia each request, as opposed to caching or something like that.

In short, wasting Wikipedia's bandwidth and your time.

Re:I tend to agree.

[creysoft]

No, what's awesome is that they actually pull[ed] the content right off of Wikipedia's servers as requests were made. So not only were they making money off of ads using Wikipedia's logo and content, they were draining Wikipedia's server resources at the same time. They contributed literally NOTHING.

Awesome.

"Leech"

[djlosch]

it seems that the site is being slashdotted (and probably on the other aggregators too). it's running ridiculously slow.

it also seems that the site rips data in real time from wikipedia, and wikimedia started forwarding all requests to the leech page.

screen: http://img.djlosch.com/ewiki.jpg

Aaaand it's over

[spun]

The site now redirects to the wiki article on "Leech (computing)" explaining why you can no longer see any other articles. That was quick.

Re:Aaaand it's over

[mysidia]

The only question is.. how long will it do that?

If the site was really a leech site -- the operator may just start using random proxies and anonymizers to load the pages.

Or Tor.

If Wikipedia attempts to block those, they will also be blocking a portion of real Wikipedia readers/editors living in certain countries where they really need to conceal their identities, to protect against prosecution for what they choose to read on Wikipedia.

Re:Aaaand it's over

[Paiev]

Actually, it's Wikipedia's policy to block open proxies for precisely this reason. Nothing's preventing a vandal from using them once his/her IP gets banned otherwise (and nothing's preventing someone from creating tons of socks undetected by the Checkuser editors, either).

Re:Aaaand it's over

[mysidia]

Last I checked: they blocked anonymous editing from open proxies. They never blocked reading the Wikipedia from open proxies.

They even potentially allowed edits from open proxies if you had an account (or if you had an account and the username you logged in as was whitelisted).

Access denied: remote loader detected

[dgreenwood]

I got the following when I accessed e-wikipedia...

"Leech (computing)
Access denied: remote loader detected.

This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.

A remote loader is a website that loads content from another site on each request. The content is typically filtered, framed with ads, and then displayed to the user.

The remote loader either:

Pretends to be the source website, perhaps using a deceptive domain name; or
Converts all instances of the name of the source website to some other name.
We consider remote loading websites to be an unfair drain on our server resources, and so they are systematically blocked, as this one has been."

Cheers

Darrell

Re:Access denied: remote loader detected

[nlmille1]

Oh man, e-wikipedia was my favorite site to browse while prorastinating work. Now I guess I'll just spend all my slacking time on my OTHER favorite site, slushdot.org

A little clue...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the site is so amazingly broken, we can tell that the offender's username on the server this is hosted on is "rocky," not that I can see that helping much. But when I was going to test the editing being broken on a random page, I found that PHP throws an error and dumps the path, and it shows it in his home folder.

MOD PARENT UP

[rockout]

That may be the most original (and somehow, the most insightful) defense of wikipedia I've read yet. I love it.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[DaveV1.0]

Um, no. The reason being that a hard bound book can not be changed for 10 minutes. Wikipedia can.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Gideon Fubar]

I'm amazed at how many people are missing Wikipedia's built in protection against this.

Every page has a history. It's possible to cite a page at a certain time and guarantee that it will be displayed regardless of what changes are made to the article. This, in addition to a diff system (and discussion), makes it better in some ways than hard print, because it allows the reader to map changes over time and consensus/disagreements over contentious topics.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[poopdeville]

Which is a lot more work than just citing a primary source in the first place. You shouldn't be citing a source you don't understand anyway.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Opportunist]

Your disadvantage I call an advantage. I'd hate to argue and back it with a book, just to find out later that the "proof" in said book has been proven wrong in the meantime.

Knowledge is not set in stone, and a scientific book is not some holy scripture, unmoving and unchanging through the ages.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Opportunist]

This can't happen with dead tree encyclopedias, of course...

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Gideon Fubar]

I'm not sure how this relates to your earlier statement. Care to clarify?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Gideon Fubar]

If you're citing a source you don't understand, using wikipedia is the least of your problems.

This applies to everyone, including myself (as yes, I am guilty of it too).

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Score Whore]

Every page has a history. It's possible to cite a page at a certain time and guarantee that it will be displayed regardless of what changes are made to the article. This, in addition to a diff system (and discussion), makes it better in some ways than hard print, because it allows the reader to map changes over time and consensus/disagreements over contentious topics.

1) You can reference any page unless an admin decides they don't like that page, then poof, it's gone.

2) Unless the people coming to consensus a) have expert training in the area of contention, and b) are performing independent experiments, talking about consensus is just stupid.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Gideon Fubar]

Your first point is potentially valid, and i wonder... how do we avoid that? I'm afraid I cannot see a way, short of making each deletion a group decision, which makes spam hard to eliminate. In addition, i think wikipedia's system is somewhat better than the current library archival system, if only because the amount of available space before this becomes necessary is far greater.

As for the second point, this is somewhat true of pure disciplines, sciences, et al. Less so of popular culture, history, politics, biographies, and many of the other things that wikipedia has comparatively good collections of. While the articles often attempt to be unbiased (yes, your first point does come into play here), various points of view are expressed in discussion, as well as observations about the history and events which shaped the live article.
I find the discussions quite interesting, as long as they doesn't devolve into shitfights, which, admittedly, they often do.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[DaveV1.0]

There are numerous examples of the Admins of Wikipedia taking control of entries to enforce their opinion on said article.

Go do a little research.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Gideon Fubar]

Those are two different issues.

I agree with what you're saying in general, but the effort required to do it is not trivial. Admins cannot stop other Admins from altering pages and cannot delete history from the frontend. Reverting a page is a positive change, and leaves an obvious mark in history.

I'm not saying that the system is ideal, by the way.. I just don't think your observation is as critical as you're claiming.

In addition, it has absolutely nothing to do with linking to a position in history.

you beat me to it. It appears wikipedia fixed it.

[plasmacutter]

I got the following when I accessed e-wikipedia...

"Leech (computing)
Access denied: remote loader detected.

This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.

A remote loader is a website that loads content from another site on each request. The content is typically filtered, framed with ads, and then displayed to the user.

The remote loader either:

Pretends to be the source website, perhaps using a deceptive domain name; or
Converts all instances of the name of the source website to some other name.
We consider remote loading websites to be an unfair drain on our server resources, and so they are systematically blocked, as this one has been."

Cheers

Darrell yeah, it appears wikipedia figured out what was going on and fixed it.

nothing to see here, move along!

hacked?

[Anonymous Coward]

the leech message makes me think the site has been hacked

Site down?

[ELProphet]

Looks like the site's down- no matter where you go, you get

Leech (computing)
This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.

Oh, wait... HA! Wikipedia turned off their mirror! This is officially the newest, coolest form of Slashdotting ever!

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[The End Of Days]

I'm sorry, have you just started coming to this site, or are you willfully ignorant?

Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters

[SpacePunk]

Yes, I remember. Ahhh, the halcyon days when Slashdot headlines were 100 percent relevent to nerds, and every post was full of knowledge and wisdom. Yes, I remember those days well.

!news

[RockMFR]

There are a bazillion mirrors of Wikipedia out there, many of which screen-scrape and/or don't provide attribution. I think the only thing different about this one is how shitty of a job they did. A lot of screen-scrapers will at least only scrape the content they are interested in and wrap it in their own layout.

Take a look at the variety of mirrors that can be found with a simple Google search (from your favorite article).

Not a surprise to me...

[jo7hs2]

This doesn't come as any surprise to me, I've seen dozens of commercial sites using Wikipedia content. The other day, I noticed that the pet social networking site animalattraction.com appears to have used the Wikipedia entries for their breed information.

Re:Not a surprise to me...

[Titoxd]

That is not the problem.

The problem is not using the information that Wikipedia provides--after all, that's why it is contributed under copyleft. The problem is that someone is essentially hosting a site that routes all the heavy computational, database, and programming work through Wikimedia's servers, usually with the intention of making a quick buck by spamming or selling ads.

What's wrong with that

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? It cites Wikipedia right there in the domain name ;-p.

Re:Interlibrary loan latency; standard dictionarie

[pimpimpim]

If an instructor gives assignments that can't be possibly done thoroughly until its deadline, they shouldn't complain to students using Wikipedia. Actually I know that in linguistics they often don't complain when the main goal the of essay assignment is to create a correct style the essay, not so much a correct content.

It depends on the type of research, if it's a chemistry assignment and the library has access to many online journals, it won't be a problem to get all sources in a day. If it's an assignment on the eating habits of the citizens of Middle-Egypt in the 16th century, it will take at least several weeks to obtain two obscure books that actually fit the subject.

Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters

[eloki]

And then the site got started :)

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, but you're actually the ignorant one. Free Software fans believe zealously in copyright. Judging from your uid, you're the one who's new around here, and judging from your ignorance of nerds and copyright, I'm guessing you're either a Mac or Windows user. You should try Digg.

Lazy script kiddies

[KalvinB]

http://cubia.dawnofthegeeks.com/ is a mirror of wikipedia that takes takes the mediawiki database and converts it into a static easy to manage database. To find an article in the DB the title is lc'd and MD5'd and the first two characters are the table and then the entire MD5 is the key for the entry in the table.

Throw in a MediaWiki parser and you have your own lightweight mirror. Every page has a link back to the original Wikipedia entry.

Not so surprisingly a 933Mhz system can't handle Wikipedia. But it can handle my version.

This setup also works on GoDaddy.

BTW, step 2 is "Ads"

Step 1: find a pile of free information on the net and host it
Step 2: put ads on it
Step 3: profit!

Script kiddies like to skip step 1 because they're too lazy to find a way to make the pile of information easily managable with limited resources.

I was lucky to have had a bug to debug...

[ClarisseMcClellan]

I had a fail for CS Assembler 101. Even though it was 68000 I did the assignment instantly (I was a BBC Micro owner and knew everything 6502). I left a printout in the bin, this was to be copied by twenty others. Come results time I was with them - in trouble.
The lecturer was keen to get to the bottom of things and I thought I was unable to prove the work was mine. I remembered a last minute bug fix that I had to make when I showed my work to a colleague. This was a half cleared register - run the program more than once and it would go wrong. I fixed it and that was the only difference other than label names and comments to all the cloned entries!
Tip to anyone good and studying CS: complete projects early, slip in a minor bug, leave printouts around...

But...

[Samah]

I've previously heard the quote:
"Encyclopedia is to Wikipedia as library is to 'some guys at a bus stop'."

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[Mr2001]

Free Software fans believe zealously in copyright. Nope. Copyright is what copyleft licenses like the GPL and GFDL rely on, but the whole point of copyleft is to subvert copyright and restore the rights that copyright law took away in the first place.

With no copyright, you wouldn't be able to force people to release their modified source code; but on the other hand, they wouldn't be able to stop you from sharing their modified binaries, or reverse engineering the binaries and porting their changes back into the open source version. No one would be able to interfere with anyone else's use. That's free.

Nuked already

[1u3hr]

the site is a live mirror of Wikipedia. So, they are using Wikipedia's content, through Wikipedia's servers, and then serving ads and spam on top of them. These get nuked by the Wikimedia server administrators quickly.

Well, as I write, it has been nuked: All e-wikipedia.net links display their frame and the Wikipedia content has been replaced by:

Leech (computing)
Access denied: remote loader detected.
This request has been identified as coming from a remote-loading website. This is not Wikipedia, please update your bookmarks. Access Wikipedia only through *.wikipedia.org.

Re:Interlibrary loan latency; standard dictionarie

[nomadic]

For example, law in the United States uses Black's Law Dictionary [wikipedia.org], falling back to Merriam-Webster for any other words.

Eh, I think the OED is the de facto dictionary for non-law research.

another story

[cvd6262]

This semester I had a student bring me a draft of a paper to look over. I thumbed through it for a few minutes and said, "It looks complete, but I can't give you a real evaluation until I've read it." He then asked some questions about the final exam (which was coming up) and we started talking about the course content. I wanted to contextualize the discussion in something familiar to him, so I started using examples from the topic of his paper.

I quickly realized he had no idea what I was talking about, so I asked him a direct question that I had seen addressed in his paper. He stared at me. I asked it again. "Am I supposed... to know that?" he asked.

He turned in his paper later. I started googling and found he had copied 23 of his 30 pages from five different websites (none of them Wikipedia). Oops. Unfortunately, it's his first offense (so he won't get expelled) and I'm the only one who teaches this class. I'll be seeing him again in a semester or two.

Re:Interlibrary loan latency; standard dictionarie

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the whining of a C student to me.

Fixed!

[Snaller]

I see wikipedia is fighting it already - good thing. Keep the amoral wolves at bay.

Wrong

[Snaller]

The information is made available under certain licensing rules which they are breaking.

Lots of for-profit companies use this info

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, see .us....

http://20500.us

OED

[falconwolf]

Eh, I think the OED is the de facto dictionary for non-law research.

I think it depends on which edition, one of the paperback editions like the Essential or American editions or the full 20something volume edition. I got my spelling of time as "tyme" from the full edition.

Falcon

Re:OED

[thedrx]

I got my spelling of time as "tyme" from the full edition.

Another mystery solved. You take away all the magic from me :(

no problems?

[falconwolf]

So long as it doesn't do horrible things to peoples' computers, I don't see an issue here.

In fact, I think theyre doing the wikimedia foundation a huge favor by providing bandwidth to a comprehensive mirror.

That site, e-wikipedia.net, harms Wiki. It didn't copy wiki articles, it literally requests the wiki page and serves it as their own. This increases the bandwidth Wiki uses, and thus the cost. When I visited the site Wiki had already taken action, it now shows "Leech (computing)" and explains what that is.

Falcon

i tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

type e-wikipedia in FF3 you'll just end up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E you would have to make an effort to end up on the wrong url, so no problems here.

Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters

[Mark Trade]

You have an 8-digit user ID. When was the time you are referring to? 2006?

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nope. Copyright is what copyleft licenses like the GPL and GFDL rely on, but the whole point of copyleft
> is to subvert copyright and restore the rights that copyright law took away in the first place.

Nope. Copyleft is a way of using copyright, a concept that we believe in. Copyright law is what allows us to do this, and have freedoms legally enforceable. Why would we want to destroy copyright, the one thing that makes copyleft possible.

Re:Interlibrary loan latency; standard dictionarie

[mr_matticus]

And definitive use in the law, as well. Merriam-Webster is not a particularly accurate, thorough, or disciplined publication. It's fine as a casual reference, but so is Dictionary.com, American Heritage, and Webster's (the REAL Webster's).

The OED is the English language resource, at least in terms of the high water mark for scholarship. It is that disciplined scholarship that leads to its criticism, however. Precise word choice, where it is important, should not be blunted by an overly populist dictionary with demonstrably lower levels of academic scholarship and fidelity.

If the term has become such a point of contention that the precise dictionary definition is required, then OED is the ultimate arbiter. If you're not squabbling over technicalities and just want the basic gist, then any of the other reputable dictionaries, including M-W, are acceptable. Stopping at M-W, on the other hand, is like saying an encyclopedia is a sufficient technical resource. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are by their nature limited. The OED is unquestionably the most detailed English dictionary, and no other resource can make a contrary claim with any real credibility. That's what makes it valuable in academic, technical, and legal research.

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[Anonymous Coward]

because copyright is the only reason copyleft is necessary.

who cares if its possible anymore if its no longer necessary?

Re:Interlibrary loan latency; standard dictionarie

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not universal. Some justices cite Merriam-Webster first and then fall back to other dictionaries such as blacks. Scalia in particular.

Re:News for nerds, stuff that matters

[Mark Trade]

Awesome. Guess I gotta get another cuppa mud. %-)

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[ta bu shi da yu]

Someone mod the parent up will they? And if they could mod down the parent's parent, all the better.

This is news?

[jrumney]

Is this really news to anyone? A simple google search will find read-only clones of wikipedia content + added advertising all over the net.

Not unusual

[timstarling]

This isn't actually particularly unusual. The SEO folks have been using Wikipedia for content for years, along with various other sources of free keyword-rich text, such as open source software manuals. We've seen them swapping scripts for it on the SEO forums. They remote load because it allows them to set up a website on $10/month shared hosting. If they set up a proper mirror, they'd need gigabytes of hard drive space, which isn't practical when you intend to abandon the site the moment it's blacklisted by the search engines. Some operators have set up identical remote loaders on tens, maybe hundreds of domain names.

Some of the sites have gone so far as to remote load Wikipedia via an open proxy rotation script. This means that pages can take tens of seconds to load. They don't care as long as google keeps crawling it.

Website stealing

[Bottle Washer]

I built the website www.mpegif.org. One day while at an international conference someone tells me about a site that looks very much like mine. I take a look, and yes it does. They stole the entire look and feel of the website including all published articles etc and passed it off as their own. That was back in 2004. It happened another time as well. This has been going on for years.

Re:Interlibrary loan latency; standard dictionarie

[The MAZZTer]

It's a good thing that internet articles don't need to be loaned from another library, then.

Pay walls

[tepples]

It's a good thing that internet articles don't need to be loaned from another library, then. A lot of Internet articles used as references on Wikipedia are from peer-reviewed journals using a "traditional" revenue structure. If your school happens not to subscribe to the specific journal in which an article was published, you'll have to pay 30 USD or so for a copy of a single article.

Re:Interlibrary loan latency; standard dictionarie

[DragonWriter]

For example, law in the United States uses Black's Law Dictionary [wikipedia.org], falling back to Merriam-Webster for any other words.

Actually, IME (as a law student), Black's is a convenient and useful resource in law because it cites back to original sources. Definitions in law are dependent on the legal context, and ultimately driven by the applicable case law, regulation, statute, Constitutional provisions, etc. Black's links back to those, and is therefore a useful tool (though not, as you seem to suggest, the final word) in finding the applicable definition for the particular context at issue.

(And when definitions of words in common use, rather than technical legal terms, are needed, there isn't a single English-language dictionary resorted to -- I've seen Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, and others cited -- but the pre-eminent one seems to be, as outside of law, the OED.)

Another possible business plan

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Mirror Wikipedia, but include ads.
2. Provoke incredulous Slashdot story, generating a massive number of hits.
3. Profit.

Every one of you that goes to check out the site is only encouraging and helping its plagiarist authors.

Re:Another possible business plan

[KGIII]

But information wants to be free!

Wow! That must've been some potent shit!

[celtic_hackr]

Where can I get some of that stuff. I could use a really good hallucinogenic of those proportions in my daily life.

As, for e-wikipedia, I hope they made all their profit before being /.ed, because the Wikimedia people shut them down with a Leech computing article, access denied, linkback page. Too, funny. Those wikimedia guys are right on it. Kudos to them for shutting down a leech so fast. It only points out the power of the set up they have. I wonder if this was all a media whore stunt by them?

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[John Meacham]

Um. I am a huge fan of the GPL and free software, and have written a lot of GPLed and BSDed software, and am fully in support of the concept of copyright in general. (Though, I think the limits need to be shortened and corporate copyright is another ball of wax). Why not allow people to control what they create? They were free to not create it in the first place, which is just as bad as if they created it and didn't give anyone a license to use it. I am against the misuse of copyright law as a bullying tool. I don't feel like copyleft is subverting copyright in any particular way, copyright law lets you do what you want with your own creations, including copyleft.

Don't get me wrong, being against copyright altogether is certainly a valid position to take, but it is by no means implied by being a fan of copyleft and free licenses.

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[Mr2001]

Why not allow people to control what they create? Because in practice, that means allowing them to control what other people are allowed to do in their own homes with their own equipment. Giving a few people veto power over everyone else's speech and actions is a drastic course of action, and there's no real need for it. I've seen no convincing argument that I should give up my own freedom so that someone else can have an easier time making a buck.

They were free to not create it in the first place, which is just as bad as if they created it and didn't give anyone a license to use it. Yes, they were free not to create it, and they chose to do it anyway, knowing full well that it could be copied. But so what? What does that choice they made in the past have to do with whether they should be allowed to limit other people's speech and actions in the present?

I don't feel like copyleft is subverting copyright in any particular way, copyright law lets you do what you want with your own creations, including copyleft. Copyleft doesn't subvert copyright law as applied to the author; it subverts copyright law as applied to everyone else. When you release a program under a copyleft license, you give me back some of the rights that copyright law took away.

Don't get me wrong, being against copyright altogether is certainly a valid position to take, but it is by no means implied by being a fan of copyleft and free licenses. You're right, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I was merely trying to rebut the parent's claim that all free software fans "believe zealously in copyright"; the truth is, some do and some don't.

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[John Meacham]

Because in practice, that means allowing them to control what other people are allowed to do in their own homes with their own equipment. Giving a few people veto power over everyone else's speech and actions is a drastic course of action, and there's no real need for it. I've seen no convincing argument that I should give up my own freedom so that someone else can have an easier time making a buck. Whoa. there is a big difference here. copyright law says nothing about restricting what you can do with your own equipment or your freedom of speech. the _only_ thing copyright law directly does is perhaps allow you to redistribute someone else's creation. The issues you mention are motivated by, but by no means necessary consequences of copyright law. I am very against tactics like the DMCA or any attempt to restrict 'fair use' or especially 'first sale'. It similar to how I for laws against murder, but opposed to warrentless searches of random citizens by police. I believe a limited form of copyright is a fine thing, but that enforcement should be a civil matter and up to copyright holders, not overreaching laws pushed through by media companies. Unfortunately, although we do have a constitution protecting us from certain types of government oppression, there is nothing to protect us from corperate oppression and copyright is one of the tools they use.

Don't get me wrong. I can fully respect the get rid of copyright position, but even if you are just fully opposed to copyright law, these are useful distinctions to make logically (and when arguing your point). Saying "get rid of all copyright law!" will cause a lot of people to brand you with a sterotype and tune out. But say "The DMCA is bad because it takes away these rights under the guise of copyright law" and you will get more people to listen and bring attention to the more pressing issues of individual rights being eroded in favor of big established money interests (It's not even like copyright law is the only one used for this purpose, this battle is a constant one fought on many fronts). Once people are convinced the DMCA (and other such laws) are bad they are more likely to give a critical ear to the "why not just abolish copyright altogether?" idea.

I would be strongly in favor of reforms... a much shorter limit. (50 years tops from creation date. no difference between personal and corporate). A broader and reaffirmed definition of 'fair use'. More laws specifically protecting 'first sale' and actual criminal penalties for organizations attempting to artificially limit your first sale rights via technological or other methods. And penalities in proportion to the damage done. rather than the absurdly arbitrary amounts the RIAA or whomever can declare now.

Re:in related news, Quadraginta is an ass

[Mr2001]

Whoa. there is a big difference here. copyright law says nothing about restricting what you can do with your own equipment or your freedom of speech. Sure it does.

1. I own an album, a CD burner, and a pile of blank CDs. I can give those blank CDs away to my friends. If I use my CD burner to put copies of the album on those CDs, however, I can no longer give them away. Copyright has restricted what I can do with my own property.
2. I can call my friend up on the phone and tell him what I did today. "I went to the store. I saw a box of cereal. The box had a picture of a tiger on it. The tiger was orange, looking to the left, and his smile revealed 12 teeth." But copyright restricts how much detail I can provide: if I happen to have a photographic memory (or a camera), I'm forbidden from telling him everything I know about that tiger (e.g. the colors of individual pixels), because I would be giving him the means to make his own copy of the picture.

Fundamentally, what copyright does is make certain communications subject to a third party's approval. If I hold the copyright on a certain work, that means there's a certain set of facts which you aren't allowed to share without my permission. I haven't seen a convincing reason why we should grant anyone such power, especially when the only thing at stake is the smooth operation of one particular business model, not public safety or national security.

I understand the rhetorical value of starting by condemning the tangible restrictions that everyone is opposed to (the DMCA prevents you from doing X with your DVDs, etc.) and then moving to abstract, principled criticisms such as those above. But in the context of this thread, I was directly addressing a factual claim about support for copyright law itself; I wasn't trying to gently convince anyone to come to my side.