I was going through the Wikipedia article on the Babbar Khalsa member
Jagtar Singh Hawara, and found that he has been described as a
"freedom fighter" in the intro. A page on the Network 18 website
in.com was cited as the reference for the term "freedom figher":
http://connect.in.com/jagtar-singh-hawara/biography-128389.html
I found it surprising that Network 18 described the alleged assassin
of Beant Singh as a "freedom fighter". On closer scrutiny, I realized
that the in.com page is just a mirror of the Wikipedia article's intro
section. This is obvious from the content and the presence of unlinked
reference numbers (such as "[1][2]") in the text. If you view the page
source, you'll find a meta tag: <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Web18
Wiki">.
It seems that Web 18 (the Internet and Mobile arm of Network 18) has
been scraping content from the introduction sections of several
Wikipedia articles on a regular basis and publishing it on in.com
without proper attribution (which is required by CC-BY-SA). This can
be confirmed by visiting other pages on the website and clicking on
the "Bio" links on these pages. A few examples:
http://connect.in.com/kuldip-singh-brar/biography-167025.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuldip_Singh_Brarhttp://connect.in.com/environment/biography-517121.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_environmenthttp://connect.in.com/taliban/biography-522879.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban
There's another, deeper problem here (which has been discussed many
times before): reputed media sources use content from Wikpedia without
attribution, and these sources are then used as references in the
Wikipedia articles to support false claims. Back in 2009, an IP user
(presumably a supporter of the Khalistan movement) had edited the
article to replace the word "Militant" with "freedom fighter":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jagtar_Singh_Hawara&diff=27769871…
Then in.come must have simply copied this content without attribution,
and in 2010, another IP address used in.com as a reference to support
the assertion that Hawara was a "freedom fighter":
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jagtar_Singh_Hawara&diff=next&old…
--
Utkarshraj Atmaram
http://ut7.in/blog/