websites copying off wikipedia

[dragonboy]

Does anybody find it annoying when you look something up and every single website to come up says the exact same thing? Why do people do that? Do they think that Wikipedia is the eternal source of information on everything? Don't you think that the people who "write" these plagerized articals on websites be atleast somewhat interested in what their writing about, thus they should be able to make their own artical about it.

I get the feeling the people who build these websites are like, "I'm going to make a website with loads of articals on shoes, even though I don't care about shoes at all. I'll just copy and paste articals on shoes from other places, just to make shoe loving people happy, even though I don't even care about shoe loving people."

[cheat-master30]

To be fair, Wikipedia is under a license that lets you use the content, although it's dodgy due to their being no way of knowing if the editors actually wrote their contributions themselves. Still, I find any copycat sites annoying, and I can definitely back up what you say; it's lazy and cheap to do this.

[(DL)*DARK*]

Yes. They do it all the time. COPYCATS.

[ninjablooper]

It is so annoying. It is okay if you just quote Wikipedia in an article and make it clearly a quote, but copying the entire page is so freaking annoying.

[cheat-master30]

Copies of any stuff is annoying. Another good example of badness is copying DMOZ (a directory). You're allowed to, but it's boring, and the original site in that case also... SUCKS!

[MrLuigi]

I find them helpful at times if I can't remember the original web-page. But when looking for good stuff, they can get up there.

[Chrisjh0223]

I find it very annoying when websites copy off Wikipedia (among any other sites); it gives me the impression that the copycat sites are not putting in any effort of their own. As cheatmaster said, "it's lazy and cheap to do this."

I did a simple Google search involving this string: harkonnen atreides ordos "lost a battle" (because I was searching for information in a certain article)

After reviewing the results, it appears that it's not too many copycats ripping information off Wikipedia, but those copycats still tick me off. :mad:

[cheat-master30]

At least in most topic areas, the duplicate content means such sites won't rank well enough to be annoying.