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Thread: Plagiarism and BG Wiki     submit to reddit submit to twitter

  1. #1
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    Plagiarism and BG Wiki

    Note: The opinions expressed here either implicitly or explicitly are mine, but the sentiment is shared across BG Wiki's main editorial team. I will move this post to te proper sub forum tomorrow after it gets some visibility.

    I wanted to spend a few words commenting on plagiarism on the Wikis. Yes, there is a specific instance that spurred my writing on this post which I will comment on below, but the scope of what I wanted to discuss reaches further than one instance.

    On each and every BG Wiki page in the footer, there is a note that says "content is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License." This refers to a rather complex legal code, which has been perfectly summarized in language intelligible by humans here:

    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/


    Quote Originally Posted by Creative Commons License
    You are free:
    to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
    to Remix — to adapt the work

    Under the following conditions:
    Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
    Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
    Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

    With the understanding that:
    Waiver— Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
    Public Domain— Where the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
    Other Rights— In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:
    • Your fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations;
    • Apart from the remix rights granted under this license, the author's moral rights;
    • Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.

    Notice— For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.

    What does this mean? You can copy any piece of information, in part or in whole, from anywhere on BG Wiki for nearly any non-commercial use imaginable with the sole caveat being that you must attribute the source unless you have permission from the "copyright holder," who, in most cases, is the individual author/editor of the work.


    From the Wikipedia article "Plagiarism" (note my citation), "Plagiarism is the 'wrongful appropriation' and 'purloining and publication' of another author's 'language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions,' and the representation of them as one's own original work."

    By copying work covered by the Creative Commons License and not attributing the source, you are plagiarizing the work.


    With the realization that the several Wikis focused on FFXI are likely pulling their information from many of the same sources (the game itself and various game forums), I'm not often compelled to investigate potential issues of plagiarism of BG Wiki material on other Wikis. I can tell you that on BG Wiki we place a great deal of importance on citing sources for all of the articles we post and, at least since I've been contributing, we never source our information from another Wiki directly.


    So, what am I referring to exactly? Over the past couple of weeks, Yugl has spent a lot of time putting together some snazzy templates and coming up with nice table formats for coalition information on the Wiki. In tandem with that, I came up with the copy and images for each of the six coalition pages (I took the screenshots for each of them myself), as well as accumulating as much information on the assignments as possible. We've also had a great deal of user contributions on individual assignments such as point values and the like.

    Here are a couple examples:

    https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Inventors'_Coalition
    https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Scouts'_Coalition

    Fast forward to yesterday and it's come to our attention that the following articles have popped up on FFXIclopedia.

    http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Inventors'_Coalition
    http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Scouts'_Coalition

    At the time of this writing, these linked pages are the exact articles copied verbatim without sourcing. Note that one or two other editors and I are the authors of the copy on the pages (the coalition logos come from SE and screenshots are owned by SE regardless of who takes them), and Yugl is the one who came up with the templates. I can assure you that neither of us gave permission for the content to be copied without citation.

    While we are aware of the individual user that plagiarized the work, I believe the problem is far more pervasive than just a single user, but this is the most blatant example that I've seen.


    Regarding the articles on FFXIclopedia, there are a couple of ways to correct this.
    1) The best solution is, and always will be, to start from scratch and come up with your own information.
    2) The easier solution would be to leave the pages as is, with a citation at the bottom of each individual page linking to the BG Wiki source page noting that all text and images were copied directly from BG Wiki.

    Dismantling and reassembling the information, which is the more pervasive form of plagiarism that I referenced above, still requires sourcing the original material.


    So, what's the point of writing this? If you use BG Wiki, that's great. We hope you like it, and hope you're compelled to contribute. If you are a user of one of the other wikis devoted to Final Fantasy XI, that's fine too, but I wanted to call this issue to your attention. In either case, I encourage you to continue to contribute sourced material and, preferably, your own material in whatever way you see fit. However, please make sure you are complying with the citation policies of your own Wiki and the original owner/author of the work you are citing.

    Yes, it's only a game, but there are many people, including myself, spending a great deal of real life time creating and editing content for BG Wiki that we don't necessarily intend to have copied and distributed elsewhere without attribution.

    -----

    tl;dr

    Don't steal our stuff. Thanks.

  2. #2
    Special at 11:30 or w/e
    Sweaty Dick Punching Enthusiast

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    Quote Originally Posted by Slycer View Post
    tl;dr

    Don't steal our stuff. Thanks.
    Just some honest questions, but is there a point in "stealing" this information that is just posted on the internet? Is it harming anyone or anything? Is profit being made by someone when it should go to the original creator? I've never understood the seriousness involved in copy/pasting information from one site to another.

  3. #3
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    its quite simple really.. you put hard work into what you put out on the internet and someone else just takes it and places it elsewhere.

    they may not claim credit for their own, but when they don't attribute it to you or ask you if its ok before doing it, it's not nice.
    also in some circles its considered plagiarism.

    a little appreciation does go a long way.

  4. #4
    Special at 11:30 or w/e
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    Quote Originally Posted by Spira View Post
    its quite simple really.. you put hard work into what you put out on the internet and someone else just takes it and places it elsewhere.

    they may not claim credit for their own, but when they don't attribute it to you or ask you if its ok before doing it, it's not nice.
    also in some circles its considered plagiarism.

    a little appreciation does go a long way.
    I understand and appreciate this information and agree with it 110%. It definitely should be noted where someone received the information. The way I interpret the reason someone would take the original posters information and post it elsewhere while claiming it their original would be strictly for internet fame I suppose? Just seems silly and pointless. But to OP's post/point, yeah you shouldn't take someones work and claim it yours.

  5. #5
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    The last time I remember this happening, over a screenshot of an NM the poster explicitly did not want on `clopedia, the reaction on their side amounted to Charitwo going 'neener neener everyone is going to use us anyway so there' and the image staying in.

  6. #6
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    I agree just taking someone's info with no credit is bullshit, I don't contribute much on bg but when I do get a chance to Its nice to get credit for it.

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    i think that is being kinda petty about it. when stuff is up on the internet there's very little you can do to specifically control it, especially if its on a wiki, where content can be crowdsourced.

    i'm generally happy when people use the content i upload to a wiki (i'm mainly active at ffwiki) but would prefer that if they wanna share it, they link to its source anyway - for reasons of attributing work and also in case people want an updated version or whatever. but thats just me

  8. #8
    Flowery Twats
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    It's rude more than anything and that should be reason enough not to just copy it to your own website.

  9. #9
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    Found it. Here's what they think about sourcing.

    http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Ra...action=history

  10. #10
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    To Slycer & Spira, i always give credit where credit is due Spira your maps kick ass man save me tons of man hours just memorizing your maps and Slycer without you we won't get such a good understand of SE's mind since there lack of English or Western based forth comings isn't as such, So Thank you both for your time and hard work

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    by the by, since we're on the topic of bg wiki, i was wondering if you guys wanted to use any of the images found here.

    all the weapon models were uploaded by me, and i've seen people link to them before, but they're not very well placed in general FF wiki (nor are the weapons/list games ever updated well enough to utilize them fully) so you can use them if u think they help and basically make better use of them XD

    its up to date. shields are in a different category tho. i might redo some of the older models i took for higher res, but they're good enough to show what stuff look like in-game.

  12. #12
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    When I first saw the title I thought it was a necrobump.

    I agree that it's shitty to steal stuff, especially when it's as blatant and unashamed as this. It always has been.

    Honest question: If someone doesn't follow the creative commons license, is there anything you can do other than glare sternly? I.e. what does the CC actually have to back it up or could the entire license functionally just have a "Please" at the end.

  13. #13
    Leader of the Brain Eating Space Monkeys
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    Seems the person who copied the info has been banned for 1 month

    http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Sp...butions/Dracko

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    Apart from the fact that it detracts from "internet fame" it also totally eliminates accountability and reduces your ability to trace where the information actually came from. As a silly example, if I suddenly dropped in to bgwiki and wrote on Tomonari +1's page:

    Code:
    == Notes ==
    * [[TP Bonus]] +150
    *Hidden effect: Zanshin proc rate +50%
    and then someone took it and pasted it onto a different website, they would have no idea that I'd totally pulled the information out of my ass. If they contacted the copypasta cook, s/he would be left either admitting to copypasta or making something up. It all works out to the basic information being untraceable and becoming part of canon when it's flagrantly incorrect.


    I included various erroneous information on bgwiki Neo-Dynamis pages in the past when we were pretty much re-creating that event pages. Nothing people would care about, just flipping the type of coins or something on a specific page. Then I wrote them down. All the changes ended up being propagated to both ffxiclopedia and gamersescape. It is pretty much totally unambiguous that they copy information we aggregate, but rarely are the offenses this egregious. In the past it was kind of, "Oh well, we had a good run and had the information a few weeks before they copied it," but this time it's more "Okay, we made the page two days ago. Your ad-supported website is surviving by copying content from a free resource. It's not cool to profit off the effort of others."

  15. #15
    You wouldn't know that though because you've demonstrably never picked up a book nor educated yourself on the matter. Let me guess, overweight housewife?
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    Honestly, you should contact Wikia and explain the issue since it's owned by them. They may not give a fuck, or they may ask that those running the site take it down or credit bg.

  16. #16
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    Being that it's a free-to-edit site, the best you can probably do is wdit the page to at least give yourself credit. Plagiarism is disgustingly overdone and original works underappreciated, mostly because the contents viewers don't give a crap where it came from, just if it's accurate. And instead of doing research and ultimately bumping into the original, they'll just edit it to their liking, making it a cesspool of inaccuracies and shit like Wikipedia was before the higher standards were out in place. Even still, the internet is full of assholes who don't care about anyone and it's very likely that because legal action is NOT a choice here, and also the anonymity of the user base, it'll just be easier to try and cite your own stuff in that wiki, and continue to make shit here.

    Also, opinions abound, Wikia is shit. Wasn't it the people at gamerescape who originally had ffxiclopedia, then sold it to wikia after everyone donated a bunch of money to keep the servers going? Maybe I have that wrong...

  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scizor View Post
    Seems the person who copied the info has been banned for 1 month

    http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Sp...butions/Dracko
    Yeah I Was going to post that but got lazy, they were banned before this thread was even made. The only problem is, the person who banned them left the page as is instead of reverting it. "Hey, what you did was wrong, so wrong that were banning you for a month...but since the pages are already there, theres no point in taking them down".

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    gee i just noticed the ffxiclopedia's SoA page lifts wholesale the stuff i wrote about it on FFwiki lol

  19. #19
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    Couldn't one of us just go edit it and remove it?

    Fullscale wiki attack! Brb getting pitchfork

  20. #20
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    Seems that someone is now reverting the changes lol