Stephen Gilbert wrote:
So, I was browsing in dmoz's open content
encyclopedia
section
(
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Open_Source/Open_Content/Encyclopedias/),
and what did I see? The Fact Factory:
http://the-fact-factory.com/
Someone has copied a fist-full of Wikipedia content
and started his own "collaborative project to create a
complete encyclopedia from scratch". This one is
loaded with ads. It's been very poorly done; many of
the edit links are broken and things like the
Wikipedia FAQ have been left unchanged.
"Today is Thursday, August 16, 2001, servertime (Pacific Standard
Time)." Looks like this has been around for a while now...
Dreadful as it is, it's still a wiki; I've added a link back to
www.wikipedia.com on the main page. RecentChanges shows no other edits
in the last 90 days; I suspect it's quite moribund.
Of course, there's nothing to stop anyone from
doing
this, so long as they comply with the GFDL.
However,I'm not convinced that The Fact Factory is in
compliance. It mentions on the front page that the
content was originally from Wikipedia, "but has now
taken on a life of its own". The article pages,
however, do not mention the original sources of the
articles.
In that particular regard, that's not much different than
enciclopedia.us.es (which is quite active and doesn't run advertisements).
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)