QUOTE(The Wales Hunter @ Wed 10th September 2008, 11:36am)
I'm amazed this hasn't happened before, given the political slant of Wikipedia (namely the slant that doesn't like the thought of individuals making money).
I'd suggest the liberal-leanings and green desires go hand-in-hand with abolishing copyright altogether, so the amount of infringement that seems to be going on at Green is no real surprise.
Might be worth taking a look around the rest of the Wikia Empire - I'd bet the sites nowhere near Wikipedia on the Google rankings don't bother with something as capitalistic as copyright at all!
You'll see plenty of it, and also just some sloppy stuff.
For example, on the Finance Wikia (you'd think a bastion of conservative, copyright-loving old schoolers), you find
a page that is an exact copy of something published
on the Interinvest site, authored by Dr. Hans Black & Malcolm Thomas. The Wikia user who uploaded it (without attribution to Interinvest or Black or Thomas) goes by the name of "Interinvest". So, that could be some naive employee from Interinvest who doesn't respect their own copyright or attribution concerns, or it's just some joker who figured he'd name his account after the one site he was going to plagiarize. Seems to be
the former. Seriously, why would you post an essay to Wikia without so much as one link or reference to your "home" source page? Stupid. I guess stupid people contribute to Wikia.
Finance Wikia is
just a wasteland, though.
A more popular and active sub-site would be something like Cyber Nations, which I would venture a guess is 99% comprised of unique and original content. But
considering the content, I don't think I would ever want to meet in person the loonies who are vomiting up this kind of information.
So, in sum after my assessments over the months of Wikia, you have three types of wikias:
1. Popular, fancruft sites that are huge, edited often, and 99% original content.
2. Much less popular, serious topic sites that are about 40%-80% culled from Wikipedia, with the remainder split between original content and copyright violations from proprietary sources.
3. Micro-small sites that never garnered more than a handful of editors and maybe 3 dozen articles.
Wikia is such an utter mess, if you actually take the 20 minutes or so to explore its far reaches.