--- Brion VIBBER <brion(a)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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