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)