[Wikipedia-l] The Fact Factory: a Wikipedia knock-off

[Brion VIBBER]

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)