[WikiEN-l] Citizendium to launch this week

[Oskar Sigvardsson]

On 3/26/07, Nick Wilkins <nlwilkins at gmail.com> wrote:
> My first click of the "random page" button brought me to
> http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Choosing_a_horse.
>
> My second brought me to http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Liechtenstein, which
> is clearly taken directly from
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtensteinwithout any attribution
> whatsoever.  They've even left in most of the image
> links and template calls, not to mention the great mass of red at the bottom
> where our interwiki links are.

I tried that too and found a bunch of pages taken directly from
wikipedia without any attribution what so ever. It's probably likely
that most of their 1000 or so articles are direct copies.

This is disgraceful. It's not like the Citizendium people doesn't
understand the concept of free content. I mean, I would think proper
attribution and non-copyright infringement was a big deal for them,
but apparently not. It's not even so much the legality of this as the
fact that they are trying to pass themselves off as "better" or
"higher quality" and then they go and steal content our editors have
worked hard at for months.

Initially I was positive to the project. You know, the more free
content the better, it's a good thing to experiment with different
editorial models. But if this is how it's going to work (did someone
actually suggest relicensing wikipedia content under cc-by-nc so we
couldn't use it?) I won't feel bad at all a year from now when they
will be virtually forgotten.

"We are not Wikipedia", says Larry Sanger. That's right! And you never will be.

--Oskar