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

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.

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. :-)

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: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.