Should Wikipedia restrict use of its articles more?

Wikipedia fuelling spam sites?

[gibbergibber]

I've just been trying to do some research on fairly obscure topics, and time and again I've found the same article repeated many times within the search results. The original article was of course on Wikipedia but there's no end of spam sites which reprint the exact same article, not as part of some new whole but just as a total clone of Wikipedia. I won't give any specific URLs of course but I'm sure most of you know what I'm talking about.

Is there really any useful purpose to be served by such clones? Surely anyone can see they're spam which pollute the search results and make endusers' lives more difficult?

Perhaps it's time Wikipedia put stronger restrictions on their articles, allowing people to quote from them or reproduce a certain amount of articles, but not allow sites to simply clone the entire contents of Wikipedia.

Any thoughts?

[hunderdown]

Perhaps the SEs simply need to do a better job of removing duplicate content from their results.

[Syzygy]

Filtering content? Perhaps they will eventually, at a cost.

I think that a two-, or even multi- tiered (channelled) web is not that far away, with "guaranteed" filtered content being offered at a subscription. Subscribers could have premium content in broad areas of interest to them and free access to all the duplicate and spam content (because you can't deny access).

How do you filter it all? Easy, charge site owners as well as visitors/viewers. Do you want your site to be among the organic crap, or stand out among the quality content, Webmaster?

Sports channels, education channels, etc... Throw in some premium TV/Film content on subscription and... hang on, this is beginning to sound just like cable TV... :-)

Syzygy

[edited by: Syzygy at 2:55 pm (utc) on July 18, 2006]

[nonni]

The problem is not with Wikipedia - it is with the search engines. The purpose of Wikipedia is to foster a creative commons, with material that anyone can use for most any purpose. Sure, many crass webmasters just tack up the same old thing, trying to get a little traffic, to sell some advertising. But others take a short article from Wikipedia and expand it into a long page, or entire website ... value added.

Do you think thousands of people will join the Wikipedia permissions committee, to decide which uses are worthy and which are not? Doesn't sound feasible.

I have seen similar problems with health products - I am looking for real information about a product, but I find dozens of short, worthless blurbs that are syndicated or put out by an company that has lots of affiliates that copy it, maybe with a little tweaking, maybe not. And they are all in the top search results. I don't blame the company, rather the search engines for not recognizing the duplicate content, and not sending (n-1) of that drivel to the dungeon.

[gibbergibber]

--The problem is not with Wikipedia - it is with the search engines.--

Why don't they filter out pages identical to Wikipedia pages then? As an enduser I get very frustrated when I see the same page over and over.

--The purpose of Wikipedia is to foster a creative commons, with material that anyone can use for most any purpose. Sure, many crass webmasters just tack up the same old thing, trying to get a little traffic, to sell some advertising. But others take a short article from Wikipedia and expand it into a long page, or entire website ... value added.--

Sure, but if they do add value, you'd see a page that had significantly different content to the Wikipedia original, and you'd probably only see a tiny fraction of Wikipedia as a whole reproduced

The sites I'm complaining about are absolutely word-for-word identical to Wikipedia, even down to having the same illustration files with the same filenames, and they have thousands of pages all taken from Wikipedia. They're Wikipedia with ads on it, basically.

--Do you think thousands of people will join the Wikipedia permissions committee, to decide which uses are worthy and which are not? Doesn't sound feasible.--

Of course not, a committee would be unworkable, but if they changed the way they licenced their content then anyone who did just clone Wikipedia could be reported to their hosting company for copyright violation.