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: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.

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: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!

[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: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.