昔の喚きたてるこ

Wikia's theft

, 28th March 2009 at 11:22 PM (916 Views)

Repeating here what TTE has said on Bulbapedia.

As work on Project Overgrow continues, so does Bulbapedia itself. Despite this, some of you may have noticed that we have been having some issues with the server as of late, with Bulbapedia being inaccessible from time to time. This is due to a glitch in the system which we have been investigating to its fullest in order to eliminate as quickly as possible.

Through our continued prosperity, however, we have garnered the attention of a less-than-favorable faction. Wikia's "The Pokémon Encyclopedia" has recently been found to have taken the content of various Bulbapedia articles, changed one or two words (while at the same time remaining formatted overall in the same way), and posted it as their own. While this is not the fault of their administrators at all, the fact that, when this is pointed out to them, the administrators do nothing about the copied content or attempt to hide our comments about it is a very disturbing fact.

The Pokémon Encyclopedia, as a Wikia wiki, is licensed under the standard GNU Free Documentation License, while Bulbapedia's content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, incompatible with Wikia's license. Bulbapedia's license requires strictly that the content is attributed to Bulbapedia and its users, and additionally, the "noncommercial" aspect of the license requires that no money is made off of the content Wikia's own About page clarifies that it is a commercial entity, while Bulbapedia's ads are in place to keep the server in place.

Bulbapedia and Bulbagarden's administrators heavily discourage vandalism of The Pokémon Encyclopedia, despite their refusal to comply to our request to remove the copied content. However, we do encourage dialog with those in charge. So please, ask them, why are you taking content that we worked on?

Here's the message I posted to Wikia. I'm posting this as a screenshot attachment because they went and banned me for this. Haven't seen an admin abuse of power as bad as this in years.

Share
- Share this post on
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Technorati
- Twitter

Categories: Bulbagarden Announcements

Email Blog Entry

« Thoughts of a self-professed Libertarian Main Testing a new addon... »

Comments

The Outrage - 28th March 2009 11:32 PM
If they're going to be so inco-operative, and the fact that they've done this before, why not take legal actions?

I'm guessing none of these users have had a proper teacher or had to ever really source any real material considering they change two words in each sentence and consider it their own.
System Error - 29th March 2009 12:10 AM
Wikia is a pile of trash, anyway. A Fallout 3 one was so badly littered with the first person (e.g. "I never had that happen to me"), and so badly formatted at times, that it was almost unreadable. Also, it has a tendancy to load slowly for no reason. Gee, I wonder why?

Anyway, if we're going to do anything about this, we should stop complaining and actually do something about it. Threaten legal action, and if they don't do what we ask, follow through on our threat.
Crankyman - 29th March 2009 12:22 AM
So what will happen from here? You didn't say how you were going to follow up on this issue.
Archaic - 29th March 2009 12:44 AM
I've already taken it to the people at Wikia Gaming, above the Wikia Pokéon group. If they don't resolve it for us in a satisfactory manner, I go above them, and so on and so on until I get to their owners.
Nekusagi - 29th March 2009 12:19 PM
I've heard horror stories about Wikia, and in general they seem like bad news. Their Pokemon Fan Works wiki, in particular, is a nightmare.
DCM - 29th March 2009 02:19 PM
Theyve Locked the topic you created, and said to stop spamming it around IRC and around wikia Liam.
Now What? Move one Step up?
~~Nando~~ - 29th March 2009 05:45 PM
What Neku said. Why else would you think we were trying to make our own fanworks wiki? Theirs is filled with blanked pages bearing incoherent titles.

You're completely in the right on this. I don't know how long it's been going on but it isn't acceptable.

(oh btw Liam: you may want to fix that image, I had difficulty getting it to display at a readable size)
Archaic - 29th March 2009 06:12 PM
Originally Posted by DCM

Theyve Locked the topic you created, and said to stop spamming it around IRC and around wikia Liam.
Now What? Move one Step up?

Considering that I only made 2 posts total, 1 on the Pokemon Wiki and that one in their forum, I really take offense to them saying I was spamming.

Yeah, if I don't get a reply (with the issue supposedly passed up the chain by them), I move up the chain myself.
The Outrage - 29th March 2009 06:57 PM
Originally Posted by Zero_Chiaki

(oh btw Liam: you may want to fix that image, I had difficulty getting it to display at a readable size)

Click on the image if it doesn't open as a separate window/tab, then click on it again to enlarge.