I'm a big fan of Wikipedia despite being a bit slow. There is even a page on it about your's truely that I threw in for fun when I wrote a few paragraphs about the IssueTrackerProduct
Now, there's a site called Explore (which I refuse to link to) that has basically ripped "everything" from Wikipedia and wraps this into their own website with Google Adwords and unblockable pop ups. It does say that it takes the content from Wikipedia in the footer but I that's not good enough for me. In a sense, what they've done is not immoral or illegal but it's just crap. Apart from the footer they make it appear as if it's their content.
Even worse, they refuse to make external links. That means that they are not generating any PageRank for real content and robots won't be able to use the Internet they way it was meant to be used: webbed.
Cheeky fuckers! I hope Google drop their PageRank right down so that when I search for "Peter Bengtsson" I get the Wikipedia one (the original source) rather than the Explore one (legal rip off).
UPDATE: Roy from Explore explains to me that Wikipedia actually encourages mirroring of content which is something I did not know. Sorry Roy. However I still think it's cheeky of them not link to external sites and that they only have server side redirect back to Wikipedia (something Wikipedia says must be corrected)
Comments
It is actually of dubious legality, and it's certainly immoral. Fortunately, Google has recently decided to take a hard line against these sort of sites in there AdSense programme; the "report inappropriate content" thing they supply will soon have a spam-site category and they say they'll be taking it seriously.