Wikia Article "Theft"

[Blondeshell]

I don't know that anyone else has noticed this, but I happened to browse through the CoH Wikia site recently and saw that many of the articles that have been added recently are exact duplicates of the articles as they appear on Paragonwiki.  (For example, "Issue 18 Badges.")  Is there any internal policy in place for policing plagiarism of our wiki articles, or is it fair game because the articles are entered into a public medium?  Or, will we just ignore it because we don't give a flying <censored> as to what happens on Wikia?

[eabrace]

Per the GNU License under which all material is published on Paragon Wiki, they are able to take material from Paragon Wiki and add it to their site.

They're supposed to give credit to the original source when doing so, though.

[Sekoia]

Actually, Wikia is now licensed under CC-BY-SA, not GFDL. So I'm not sure they can even legally copy GFDL content to their wiki anymore; I don't know if the two are compatible. Either way, the GFDL requires attribution, which they are certainly not giving. That's both illegal and obnoxious.

Regardless, there's not much we can do about it. Saying something is pointless. Some of their users and admins are blatantly hostile to us. And the people who own Wikia don't seem to care about community anymore, they just care about getting ad traffic. (If they cared about the CoH community, they'd have shut the CoH Wikia down years ago rather than leaving a horribly outdated husk around to draw in search engine traffic.)

Nonetheless, they do have a post on the topic on their forums. I'll bump it.

[GuyPerfect]

So I'm not sure they can even legally copy GFDL content to their wiki anymore; I don't know if the two are compatible. Either way, the GFDL requires attribution, which they are certainly not giving. That's both illegal and obnoxious.

It'd be a civil issue if anything, but GFDL doesn't impose criminal liability to anything. Having said that, we can ask them real nicely to knock it off, but we'd be hard pressed to actually enforce anything if they decided they wanted to get away with it.

[Aggelakis]

Also, who do we contact about them using the ParagonWiki favicon? Looks like something that was missed during the leave-taking scrubbing.

[Sekoia]

Also, who do we contact about them using the ParagonWiki favicon? Looks like something that was missed during the leave-taking scrubbing.

It apparently got uploaded at some point and thus is GFDL'd: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/File:Favicon.ico

EDIT: Actually, the person who uploaded it wouldn't have had the right to release it under GFDL. However, it did happen during our tenure with them, I believe.

[eabrace]

Just for fun, I looked up the CC-BY-SA documentation.  Here's what it has to say about importing:

Importing text

If you want to import text that you have found elsewhere or that you have co-authored with others, you can only do so if it is available under terms that are compatible with the CC-BY-SA license.

Work which you do not hold the copyright to, or which is not available under this license, should not be added to Wikia.

If you import text under a compatible license which requires attribution, you must, in a reasonable fashion, credit the author(s). Where such credit is commonly given through page histories (such as copying within Wikia), it is sufficient to give attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page history, when importing the text.

Non-text files

Freely licensed or public domain images are strongly preferred on Wikia.

Non-text media on Wikia should not be assumed to be available under the same license as the text. Please view the media description page for details about the license of any specific media file.

If you are uploading files to Wikia, you should cite the source of the file, attribute the authors, and note any copyright information, where applicable. Individual communities may elaborate upon and refine requirements for file uploads.