The other day the Vietnamese Wikipedia community found a
Vietnamese-language search engine, Viet99 <http://www.viet99.com/wiki/>,
that is direct-loading the entirety of vi:, as evidenced by the
up-to-datednesss of
<http://www.viet99.com/wiki/?title=Special:Recentchanges> -- compare to
<http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges>.
The website uses <http://www.vacilando.org/index.php?x=7065>, a
direct-loading PHP script. The author of that script maintains a
poorly-behaved Wikipedia mirror at
<http://www.vacilando.org/index.php?title=Main_Page>. Unlike the
Vacilando mirror, though, Viet99 removes the script-provided references
to GFDL and slap on their own Google-provided advertising and copyright
statement: "Copyright 2005, Viet99. All rights reserved." They did keep
the part of the script that provides an edit link back to the real wiki,
but that's about it. Viet99 doesn't make it clear that the Wikipedia
content isn't actually their own work, and they make no effort to
explain what Wikipedia is; the only explanation is what we added at the
bottom of our main page to make sure that no Viet99 users get
misinformed about Wikipedia.
My understanding is that this is a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use
and the GFDL, and that they should be blocked. We could find no contact
information on their website, and a whois search revealed (presumably)
their host, A Theory <http://a-theory.com/>. I posted a message to IRC
and this mailing list the day we found out about this issue, but the IRC
message got ignored (probably the wrong time of day), and my previous
e-mail never made it through to the list.
Please consider blocking this direct-loader, because it's just adding to
Wikimedia's bandwidth for Viet99's own profit.
--
Minh Nguyen <mxn(a)zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn(a)myjabber.net; Blog:
http://mxn.f2o.org/