Wikipedia uses Citizendium article without attribution
Yep, some unsigned-in person over on Wikipedia went to Wikipedia’s “Biology” article and basically replaced it with the first paragraph of the Citizendium’s “Biology” article (our first approved article), posted here (PDF, 735K). And they didn’t give us credit, as they are required to do by the GFDL!
Of course, we are still working on the software that will allow contributors to check or uncheck a box to indicate whether any of the content of an article came from Wikipedia, so some of CZ’s articles, copied over by hand, have no automatic link-back to the Wikipedia article. We feel very very sorry about this. ;) So neither project is in total compliance!
I’m sure everyone means well and all such problems will be fixed in time.
All in all, I love both Wikipedia and Citizendium.
Comment by cow_2001 — January 26, 2007 @ 3:34 am
So what exactly do you expect to see on Wikipedia, if some of your content is used?
Credit in an edit summary? A citation? A full out template with a link? Technically, they shouldn’t be crediting CZ at all, should they?
I thought under the GFDL people maintained their own copyright, and the site hosting the content technically owned nothing at all. So then shouldn’t it be the individual authors credited? By that note, you didn’t list the contributors to this CZ article, so there was no one to credit. Correct me if I’m wrong.
And if you’re no longer planning a “progressive fork”, why not get all the contributors to relicense the content under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so that the material can’t be copied at all?
Comment by Jane Barrios — January 26, 2007 @ 8:29 am
This poses a problem. Citizendium cannot move from Beta to Live until the problem of attribution according to the GFDL is sorted, because it would be absolutely panned. I came across this when looking at the Karl Popper article which is basically the Wikipedia article with tweaks. The only link (as of 25feb07) is a link to the Citizendium Wikipedia article - which doesn’t exist. Not exactly compliant!
Comment by Neville English — February 25, 2007 @ 3:45 am
Neville, what facts determine what is “in compliance”? The GFDL appears to require all sorts of absurd things, which answers.com for instance does not satisfy.
Comment by Larry Sanger — February 25, 2007 @ 11:41 am