Is GNU allowing MFAs to use Wikipedia content?

A new form of MFAs?

[annej]

It appears to me the GNU Free Documentation License gives Made for Ads sites the legal right to use any information from Wikipedia for their content. I've already run across one MFA site with content in my topic. They even note they have permission to use it according to GNU. Has anyone else noticed this? Is this going to be the new explosion of MFAs?

[jikel morten]

I've noticed it as well and wondered the same thing.

[martinibuster]

Old explosion.

[jomaxx]

I believe the content can be used for pretty much whatever you want, same as DMOZ. The limiting factor, as always, is getting people to the pages in the first place.

[annej]

I checked with wikipedia and the answer is yes, the GFDL license they use does allow for commercial use. <sigh>

I just hope all the MFA sites made this way are soon in supplimental****.

[mattg3]

I think the problem with wikipedia is that it makes a large chunk of evergreen content basically pointless to produce, as Google by default seems to bring wikipedia on the top of the serps, which creates a singularity many websites can't compete with. I know several sites now that added it just to have that content + what they usually have and worked on for years. All these pointless GNU _CONTENT_ projects should be banned out of the serps, imo, or made really free to use. This wikipedia human content scraping really makes content more an more worthless. So either it should be banned as being uncommercial or everyone should have it, leveling the playing field for everybody.

[BertieB]

Let bring the text of the GNU FDL into play here. From the preamble, emphasis mine:

The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

Without going into the specific provisions of the GNU FDL, it looks like the license grants the permission for a MFA site (commercial) to use wikipedia content. As I recall Wikipedia itself states that content can be reused, but they ask that the text "This page includes material from the Wkipedia article Widgets" be included.

I think martinibuster was alluding to this being old news -- this 'problem' has existed for a while. It is very trivial for Google to find a site using Wikipedia content verbatim or with little modification and penalise for duplicate content. Hence no problem.

The only issue is that it is not really in the spirit of Wikipedia, but that is a moral issue, not a legal one.

[annej]

"This page includes material from the Wkipedia article Widgets" be included

Yes the MFA site did this and referred to GNU as giving them permission to use it. If they all go supplemental maybe it won't be too much of a problem.

I had started to add some info to wikipedia as the pages on my specific topic have some glaringly false information that most people wouldn't recognize but anyone in the field would. I'm inclined to not add anything more knowing this. I certainly don't want to encourage more junk sites on the net.

[incrediBILL]

Note you're permitted to modify the content so using a simple program to randomly replace various words without altering the meaning of the document would probably avoid supplemental listings as Google most likely wouldn't detect the duplication.

[jomaxx]

I know of a site that was primarily a DMOZ clone. It didn't use the particular strategy mentioned above but did do something else that could be interpreted as subverting the dup filter. Suffice it to say that as soon as it started to rank in Google, it received a manual penalty and remains PR0'ed to this day.

[edited by: jomaxx at 11:30 pm (utc) on April 9, 2006]

[andrea99]

Yes, you are permitted to modify the content and if it's done thoughtfully there is added value and won't go supplemental.

Sure a simple word scrambling program could be used but for two years at least the MFA scrapers have been doing that without permission with copyrighted content.

The one scraper program that I examined allowed adjustments for the degree of "scramble" and even warned that too little scrambling risks dup penalties and copyright issues while too much scrambling causes a worthless article. duh...

The fact that Wikipedia allows use and modification should be a time advantage for anyone writing content for the web and clever enough to add value.