[Wikipedia-l] Reports of AFP using Wikipedia content without attribution

[Mathias Schindler]

Hi,

today I was informed that the German subsidiary of AFP (Agence France
Presse), a news agency seems to have taken a significant amount of
text about the Amish from de.wikipedia.org.

In a phone call, the AFP office confirmed that the text was from
Wikipedia and stated that this was against "AFP policy" because
"wikipedia is not a citable source". They refuse to retract or ammend
the story with proper attribution for Wikipedia and the license.

On the other hand, AFP sued Google News in 2005 because in AFP's point
of view, Google was violating their copyright.

A short report about this event from today can be found (in German) at
http://mathias-schindler.de/index.php/2006/10/03/einladung-zum-textvergleich/.

I will update or correct anything there. Feel free to translate the
text or refer to it.

Mathias