Monday, October 17th, 2005, 5:42 am
WikiMirror – Vile Ripoff
Filed under:
Content scrapers: where is the original content? Which one is the ripoff?
UCH that we see on the Internet these days are mirrors, although we are rarely aware of it. Several crooks make good money out of it. Some search engines are crippled by the fact that they have no knowledge as to which sites are known ‘mirror culprits’ and which ones can be trusted. Consequently, search engines like Yahoo tend to return many references to content scrapers, which is a deterrent.
As I go about looking at some SERP‘s I suddenly come across a commercial site — a Wikipedia mirror — that had been registered since January 2005. Its description in Google (judge for yourselves):
Wikimirror.com – Free encyclopedia search a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z _ · Google Web Encyclopedia.
WTF? Is the Creative Commons Licence an invitation to massive, huge-scale ripoffs? A community of WikiPedians around the world is voluntarily spending time in vain? To get somebody else rich(er)? I have had a look around the site in question. It appears like a complete mirror, which I must stress cannot be edited, unlike its much superior source. I recently discussed the issue of people mirroring the CIA Factbook, which is public content, in a relevant newsgroup. When will this end? And why has Google not banned Wikimirror.com yet? Does the domain name not say something? Helloooooo…?
I spoke to Chris Pirillo about Blogspot spam yesterday. After our discussion he posted an item that makes a nice little read. That item is titled Google: Kill Blogspot Already!!!, which is a venturous and strong title to be used by somebody as prominent as Chris.
Also while on the subject, have a look at Networkmirror.com [rel='nofollow']. In its defence, this one-among-many Slashdot mirrors does not archive content and it serves a defensible purpose — that of mirroring sites before they go down due to the Slashdot Effect. Then mirrors sites at least get exposure while they cannot cope with the demand.
UPDATE: 1-script argues that I may have been a little hasty in posting this item. The site states:
Content Credit
Wikimirror financially supports the Wikimedia Foundation. Displaying this page does not burden Wikipedia hardware resources. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Contact: info [AT] wikimirror [DOT] com
As a side note, I still think that Wikipedia contributers (me included) ought to be aware of these facts (or the existence of this mirror), which may imply that their contributions become commercial and thus money-making.
October 17th, 2005 at 2:15 pm
An excerpt from a Wikimirror.com:
Content Credit
Wikimirror financially supports the Wikimedia Foundation. Displaying this
page does not burden Wikipedia hardware resources. This article is from
Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free
Documentation License. Contact: info [AT] wikimirror [DOT] com
Did you check if the statement is true before giving them this much bad
publicity? I have no idea if they do “financially support” WiKi or not,
but it is very well possible that they donate some part of the money they
earn from AdSense on this pages (at least for tax relief purposes), and
then you would really sound like an a**hole attacking people that support
the same cause that you do.
What is it, Roy, maximalism of youth?
December 4th, 2005 at 8:46 pm
I’m the owner of the site you critically described as a “vile ripoff”, before referring to me as a “crook”.
I’m sorry you feel so strongly this way. The intention of wikimirror was to provide additional enhancments to wikipedia content, in addition to combining it with other reference material such as wordnet.
I have invested some time in adding a few unique features, such as tooltips showing summaries of interlinked articles, and am in the process of further enhancing the site.
The wikimirror page has contact information clearly available, and it’s a shame you didn’t contact me with your viewpoint or suggested improvments before you went on your rampage to publicly humiliate my site.
Wikipedia’s policy has nothing against mirrors, providing the license information is left intact, and credit is given. As a significant portion of the advertising revenue from wikimirror is donated back to Wikipedia, I do not believe I am harming the wikimedia foundation.