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

Dupe

[Lev13than]

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

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.

Let me guess...

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

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

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: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: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: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. :-)

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

[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

[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.

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!

[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.

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!

[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: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: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.