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

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.

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.

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: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: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.