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/
Originally Posted by Creative Commons License
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.
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tl;dr
Don't steal our stuff. Thanks.