Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks

For sites using Wikipedia material in violation of GNU FDL see #Articles with issues

Note: Wikipedia does not give legal advice.

The Web sites listed here use content original to Wikipedia as a source for at least some of their content (and, in some cases, acknowledge this). Wikipedia's copyright, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) requires that any derivative of works from Wikipedia must be released under that same license. Unless they're fair use, public domain, or the authors of the Wikipedia article have given permission.

If the following websites have not released their derived works under the terms of the GFDL, we could send them a standard letter to notify them of their possible copyright violation. If they decide to release their derived works under the terms of the GFDL, we may harvest those derivative works for content.

Compliant

Compliant articles, for the purposes of this listing, are articles which have at a minimum:

A link back to the original Wikipedia article
A link to the GFDL (local or from www.gnu.org)

NationMaster

(basically all wikipedia articles)

Now an extremely small font of 5pt is used, therefore perhaps not compliant anymore. E.g. "Wikipedia" can be recognised by people knowing the name, but is otherwise not legible. This applies even for people with very good eyes, because it is caused by a lack of pixels: e.g. it is inevitable that an "e" with a height of 4 pixels shows up as a "c". However, this problem does not apply when specifying "ignore font size specified by webpage", e.g. in Internet Explorer. Also the tiny text can be copied to an editor and then read, or after just applying the copy command, read on the clipboard.

link to current version of article
link to the GFDL on www.gnu.org

TutorGig

(basically all wikipedia articles)

link to current version of article, labelled "Edit this article".
link to the GFDL on www.gnu.org

====Abacci books==== (biographies)

link to current version of article
link to GFDL

CapitanCook (wiki)

(ca. 630 articles on geographic locations [1])

Link to Wikipedia article
All content is already under GFDL (notice on each page)
No local copy of FDL text (just a link to the GNU's FDL page)

====Malaspina Great Books==== (biographies)

acknowledgement link to current version of article
~~no mention of GFDL.~~
Standard letter sent by: MB 08:01 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Points of contact, McNeil, Russell [email protected]; Duprey, Dave [email protected].
Response received Sun, 13 Jul 2003 23:25:11 -0700 by Russell McNeil. "I have so far converted about 60 percent of the files - the remainder will be in place by the end of the week."
Now links to the GFDL - hurrah.

About.com

~~acknowledgement without a link~~
~~no mention of GFDL.~~ Standard letter sent by: MB 08:01 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Point of contact, Mary Bellis [email protected].
Response received Sun, 13 Jul 2003 04:26:14 -0700.
Portions of affected articles at inventors.about.com (as of July 14 2003) link back to wikipedia and are released under the GFDL.

====Internet-Encyclopedia (wiki)==== (note: this site "was inspired by wikipedia" and uses its software). Also at (at least temporarily). http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info ; see Internet-Encyclopedia.

Has copies of about 3500 Wikipedia articles; the intention is that they will be edited according to their different policy.

link to current (or sometimes older) version of article
link to GFDL

Cold war article

Uses an old version of Wikipedia Cold War article
~~Links to Wikipedia article~~

~~No GFDL link~~
Contact: Dr. Harold Damerow <[email protected]>. Letter sent by: dave 20:30 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
There is now a link to the article and to the GFDL. Thanks to Dr. Damerow! dave

History of Scotland

~~Link to Wikipedia, not article though~~

~~No link to GFDL, funny because it's on the Scottish Law Online web site.~~
Standard letter sent by: dave 07:29, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- They've fixed it now dave 16:57, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Link to GFDL
Link to original Wikipedia article

Axiomization

Link to original Wikipedia article
~~no link to GFDL~~
contact point: Jón Erlendsson <[email protected]>
Standard letter sent by: dave 07:43, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Link to GFDL dave 16:55, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Din Cyclopedia

Contains a number of pages of Wikipedia, with all links. The links point to the local copy if it is there, otherwise to the current Wikipedia article
GFDL link (non-local, though)

French Wars of Religion

Uses the article about the French Wars of Religion
Provides link to original article
Contains a GFDL Link with disclaimer

Filmbug

Uses ca. 240 Wikipedia articles, see [2]
Provides links to current articles
Contains links to copy of GFDL

Web Hosting Glossary

(uses a couple dozen technical/Internet related entries)

link to current version of article
link to the GFDL on www.gnu.org

Fair Use

These articles are ones which use Wikipedia content under Fair Use.

onelook.com

The first part (ca. 230 characters, sometimes less) of basically each article
almost certainly fair use
link to current full version of the article
link to GFDL on acknowledgments page
contact form

The Logo (A Book)

Uses the article about the book: "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies"
Mentions Wikipedia, and provides a link to the front page
No GFDL Link
Looks like fair use to me. Martin 10:18, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Invalid

These are articles which either no longer exist, or they no longer use Wikipedia content.

Gyrocoptor article

References Wikipedia, but no link back to original article.

No GFDL link.

~~Contact: [email protected], [email protected], John Ednie. Letter sent to both email addresses by dave 15:46 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)~~
Article no longer exists. dave 07:13, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Judgement of Paris

Link to Wikipedia article

no link to GFDL

~~Standard letter sent by: ?~~
Article no longer exists

Bicycle article

Link to current Wikipedia article

no link to GFDL

~~contact point: webmaster ([email protected])~~
Standard letter sent by: dave 07:38, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)
I think they removed it. Waiting to hear from webmaster if they changed URL or not. dave 18:18, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Articles with issues

These are web pages which are in some kind of violation of Wikipedia:Copyrights.

http://www.informationheadquarters.com/

Link to GNU FDL.
Link to Wikipedia homepage via "Help build the worlds largest free encyclopedia".
No mention at all that the content is from Wikipedia.
No link to original article.

www.basicclassics.com's people section

"It is believed that all material on this web site is in the public domain." (Most of the website appears to be out-of-copyright literature, so it's mostly true)
No link to/mention of Wikipedia or GDFL.
Point of contact: Steven J. Hayes
Standard letter sent by mav 03:06, 6 Nov 2003 (UTC)

4reference.net

link to main page only
no mention of GFDL. Standard letter sent by: MB 08:01 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Points of contact Wilson, Jaret [email protected].
Response recieved Sun, 13 Jul 2003 15:44:48 -0400. "I'll be glad to include a GFDL notice. The site is new and still a work in progress, so it doesn't surprise me that I've missed something. Thank you for pointing this out. I'll make the change within the next couple days."
No note visible yet -- see [3] for example. -- Gutza 02:20, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Whatever they do over there, it's not particularly clever. One of the first pages I randomly clicked was this: http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/Elisabeth_in_Bavaria.html . --KF 00:38, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Sternly worded followup letter sent to mr. Wilson by: Gutza 10:41, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)
- They now show a GFDL notice at the bottom of each page copied from Wikipedia, and they link to Wikipedia, as they always used to. This is good enough for me, I think these guys are GFDL compliant. IANAL though, so I won't strike them in this page on my own accord. --Gutza 23:02, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)
They don't seem to be overly discriminating with regard to what they vacuum out of here, either. [4] - Hephaestos 08:04, 3 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- LOL. dave 07:22, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)
My issues with 4reference:
1. They use image captions without the images. Clever, eh???
2. They remove the original paragraphing so the articles are solid blocks of text.
3. Subhead captions are bigger than article headings.
4. No search function - you have to select from alphabetical lists.
5. Lags behind Wikipedia updates.
- Lee M 23:43, 5 Nov 2003 (UTC)

TYPEsyria.com

(bizarrely, they have a copy of our Jordan disambiguation page! Amongst other content.)

no link to article
no link to GFDL. Standard letter sent by: MB 08:01 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
- no response received as of Jul 18. Will contact via domain name administrative contact [email protected]. Does anyone know what country .ae is? Does anyone know of a translator program, or know the language of this country? MB
  - Sounds like United Arab Emirates. Guessing from their location, I'm guessing they speak Arabic (perhaps a different dialect, but I doubt it), like all the other countries around there. There should be a lot of English too. dave
  - .ae is the United Arab Emirates, and the main languages include Arabic, English, Persian, Hindi, and Urdu.
Looks like typesyria is down, but typenetwork.com still has several coppies of Wikipedia, including almost the entire site typeencyclopedia.com. It uses a very old, outdated version of Wikipedia. LDan 04:09, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

magnet-university at rare-earth-magnets.com

Lots of stuff taken from Wikipedia, like Magnetism article, biographies under "Magnetic personalities", and a few others.
It says Copyright 2002 - GNU Free Documentation License. This is hyperlinked to a year 2000 version of the GNU license!
- Linking to the old version is OK. We used that initially.
No mention of Wikipedia anywhere, no link to article
Is this a breach? If so, what should we do?
- Yes it is a breach. Wikipedia has to be credited and either a link back or list of 5 authors is needed. Time to send a letter. --mav
  - Actually Wikipedia doesn't have to be credited, since it's just another publisher of the user-copyrighted text, like all the other sites on this page. Only a list of five authors is necessary (the link back can be in lieu of that).
Standard letter sent by: dave 19:28 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Received reply from [email protected], and they are willing to fix it. Can someone tell me exactly what to tell them to do? I know they need to link to the original Wikipedia article, but what about the GFDL? Can they link to a local version or a gnu.org version? Anything else? dave 18:44 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)
- See above ^"Linking to the old version is OK." However you should suggest they link to the newest. MB 20:08 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Finally sent reply to Scott Madsen today outlining what he should do to fix it, and telling him all the articles that were lifted from Wikipedia (he had emailed me asking which articles were from wikipedia). I'm confident they'll fix it although I'd expect it to take a while. dave 07:25, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Palestine article

No link to Wikipedia article
no link to GFDL
No contact information on the main page of their website. Can anyone find it?
Standard letter sent by: ?

RSA article

No visible link to current Wikipedia article
no link to GFDL
Standard letter sent by: ?
It is an HTML copy of the print version so "Retrieved from "http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=RSA"" is on the page. But there still isn't a link to the GFDL. We really should add that to our print page template. --mav 02:19 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Type United Kingdom

No link to original wikipedia article
No GFDL link
standard letter sent by LDan
The same network as typesyria.

Wikipedia printable version

Links to current Wikipedia article, but not at the stable URL (not a clickable link either)
No GFDL link

I think we should send the developers the standard letter - I already submitted a feature request and mentioned this issue on their mailing list; no response whatsoever. It is very important that the printable version is OK per our copyright since that is a nice clean HTML copy of an article. --mav 10:46, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Works now. :) Martin 14:27, 3 Sep 2003 (UTC)

PostgreSQL General Bits

Link to main page of Wikipedia
Very small section of article about Edgar F. Codd (1 paragraph)
No link to GFDL or the article

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com

Contains a small section of the article about vendor lock-in
Mentions Wikipedia, but has no link
No GFDL Link

Unknown Brussels Site

Most of main site is in Dutch
Copies the Semantic Web article completely
Mentions Wikipedia and has a link on the bottom (not clickable)
No GFDL Link

Public Domain

Uses a part of the article about Public Domain (1 paragraph)
Mentions Wikipedia with no link
Contains a section of the Fair Use Doctrine of the U.S. Copyright Act, stating something about "fair use", but no GFDL Link.
More than one paragraph, AFAICT. Martin 10:22, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Chessbase.com

(article about Howard Staunton)

link to current version of article
still contains typos fixed in current version
no link to GFDL (perhaps not needed - very short text)
- I agree, but we could tell him to put source: wikipedia (under GFDL). wikipedia would link to article, gfdl to license?
- It's long enough to be copyrighted, so they should probably license the entire thing under the GFDL. Which will be nice, because they have some nice photos we could use. Martin 10:41, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)
- Any more feedback for this? Should we tell them to license the entire article, or just add "(under GFDL)" with a link to the GFDL. The rest of the article is unrelated to the first part about Howard Staunton IMHO, so I don't see how it is even an extension of the Howard Staunton article. dave 18:28, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Complexity Theory page

No link to original article
No mention of GFDL

basicmusic.net

No mention of / links to wikipedia articles
No mention of / links to GFDL

John Cage article
- quotes John Cage (14 April 2003 edit, looks like) in its entirety, without crediting the source
- no mention of Wikipedia
- no mention of GFDL
The same site has Leonard Bernstein [5], maybe others. --Camembert
- no longer online. Check again in a month. dave 18:59, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)
  - It's back. Still no attribution or mention of GFDL. --Camembert 23:40, 21 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Just checked out their use of our Bob Dylan article here. They stuck on a new opening paragraph, made tiny changes to the rest of the text and make no mention of Wikipedia or GFDL. So, this has been going on for at least six months. How do we bust em? JDG 00:25, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)
Just looked at Bryan Adams they use wikipedia content.
Sent a Wikipedia:Standard GFDL violation letter to the webmaster. --snoyes 23:58, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
- No reply. Sent the email again. --snoyes 23:52, 5 Nov 2003 (UTC)

EncycloZine

( http://encyclozine.com/ )

Many articles, sometimes older versions, for example see Artzia/Law EncycloZine is organized into subsites which include: Artzia.com, Eluzions.com DiXionary.com Kosmoi.com and possibly others, all very liberally plastered with links to books available on Amazon. Wikipedia articles are most likely to be met with on Artzia.com and Kosmoi.com

Not always link to current version of article
Not always link to GFDL

eurovisionarchive

( http://eurovisionarchive.members.beeb.net/ )

Year Pages for Eurovision takes from wikipedia for example see: http://eurovisionarchive.members.beeb.net/Years/1969.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest_1969 (they ahve added the interval sections witch i amn finsihing at the moment and its not exactly the same).

No mention of Wikipedia
No mention of GNU FDL
- If there is any its not on each page.