Forum:Fullwiki.org and attribution

I've just found out that fullwiki.org runs a copy of what seems most if not all Wikia content.

In case of our wiki, it's attributing the wrong copyright license, since we don't have the usual Wikia license, so I did send them an email about that via their contact form.

However, I also feel that they're not attributing the authors properly: when I make an edit on Wikia, the page history attributes it to me, but fullwiki doesn't do that. If you're also concerned about that, you probably should contact fullwiki as well.

For your information, here's what I sent them via thefullwiki.org/contact.php:

Legal issues http://misc.thefullwiki.org/GuildWiki%3AAbout

"All original content is licensed under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license. All other information, art, skill images, are Copyright to their original creators, NCsoft, or ArenaNet." -- vs. the page footer, which states "This article uses material from the "GuildWiki:About" article on the Guild Wars wiki at Wikia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License."

Subject: noncommercial license

I am User:M.mendel on guildwars.wikia.com, and I am one of the "bureaucrats" entrusted with administrating that wiki.

Unlike most other Wikia wikis, GuildWiki was acquired by Wikia in 2008, and retained its original Creative Commons noncommercial license. All of the fullwiki pages that have GuildWiki content misstate this license as the lesser Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License that is lacking the noncommercial clause.

I also feel that you are not attributing the individual authors of the license as much as the license would require - a backlink to Wikia is not sufficient, because the content was contributed in an environment that attaches individual credit to each contribution (via the "history" tab or button), which your setup fails to do (unless I'm missing something).

I request that you remove the GuildWiki data from your archives; or, if you want to keep republishing our data, do attach the correct copyright license information to it.

I request that you give proper credit to the individual authors.

Thank you! Michael Mendelsohn http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/User:M.mendel

--◄mendel► 13:24, May 7, 2011 (UTC)


 * If they've been doing this everywhere on Wikia, you probably want to Special:Contact as well, and see if Wikia can do anything about it.
 * If they attribute properly - then there's nothing wrong with this. Running mirrors is fine - as long as you properly attribute under the license  Random Time  13:42, May 7, 2011 (UTC)
 * Randomtime, the license says "Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor" - in lieu of an explicit specification, the "manner" is the one that the site teh content was posted to uses. Originally, this was the "history" tab on monobook and monaco; with Oasis, we had a link on the "recent edits" dropdown, and there's still a "history" link under the edit button. There is no such thing on fullwiki because it's not a full mirror.
 * The legalese in the CC license (section 4c) goes like this: You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied. --◄mendel► 14:15, May 7, 2011 (UTC)


 * Slightly off topic, but Wikia doesn't seem to have a strong commitment to enforcing licenses, so I doubt you'll get help from them. The image attribution feature introduced with Oasis was basically an obvious violation of CC-by-SA for images that I mentioned way back before it was widely released, but they made no changes and still haven't. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 9 May 2011 1:38 PM Pacific