--- Brion VIBBER brion@pobox.com wrote:
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.
Another stupid thing is all of the user pages from that time have been copied as well. I edited my to say that I am not a contributor to the Fact Factory. Everybody else should check to see if they are listed as well.
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).
It's my understanding the the Spanish project did not copy the whole Spanish database, but contributors who left Wikipedia took the content that they wrote and copied it over. I'm not totally sure, however.
Stephen G.
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