Gamewise.co importing assets from GiantBomb

I want to apologize for everything that has happened, as well as deceiving anyone with not mentioning that I was an admin at first. As Krystal pointed out, we are tasked with updating information on the newest games first and foremost, so that's why this went unnoticed for so long.

It will take a while to comb through everything on the site, checking to see what has been copied. I have gone through about 8,000 characters or so already, deleted/edited any copied content. As you will see, it will take a long time to get everything up to order, as I list the number of entities below.

• 45,655 Games
• 19,010 Characters
• 16,151 Companies
• 89,493 People
• 2,203 Franchises

My ribs hurt from laughter, and I feel dirty for giving them traffic while checking to see if any of my obscure DS game wiki entries had been lifted. Shower time.

Well good luck VG and Krystal, seems like you've got your work cut out for you.

I hope you guys just do this on the side for extra cash and not as a full time job, places that operate this heartlessly for profit tend to not be healthy for long term employment

I love a good internet revenge story.

@laserbolts: The problem is the multiple attempts at deception from these people. How am I supposed to take the word of someone who pretends to be unaffiliated with a site while at the same time advertises that same site, AND is in fact affiliated with that site? Then making accounts and commenting on the Huffington post article pretending to be random bystanders who just read the article and decided to defend it?

The worst part? It seems like they're going to get away with it. The article hasn't been changed, and it never will be.

Edit: This post was way more hostile before some moderator came along and changed it, I appreciate that it wasn't just deleted outright. I'll simply say that I do not have any kind words to say about these people.

Well, I just commented again the HuffPost article and reminded Mr. Hendricks that we're waiting for the update. The comment is now under moderation. Anyway, if I had a praising article on HP and then someone like TotalBiscuit who's against my site I wouldn't be so happy.

Is there any way to prove that Gamewise's user count is fabricated. Clearly that "90,000 users" number on the front page is a fantasy. Also stuff like the number user ratings on each game page is obviously made up. There are 4,500 user votes for skyrim, which has been going up 250 votes per day, since i've been looking at it. And we can actually see there is only a handful of contributing users on the site.

Also, even if Gamewise deletes all the stolen wiki content from their pages, they still have empty pages for 20,000 character which wouldn't even exist if they hadn't imported all of GiantBomb's data. And they advertise that huge number pages as a claim to authority, on their front page, and in the huffpost article.

Per Mr. Hendricks on Twitter:

Drew Hendricks is kinda scummy, we should mass e-mail Huffington Post to complain about the false info in his story and the conflict of interest in the story as well.

@chaser324 said:

Per Mr. Hendricks on Twitter:

Wouldn't hold your breath on anything getting done, considering he said in this very thread that he was working on changes to the article and then blaming the lack of changes showing up on the amount of time it supposedly takes for updates to appear on the HuffPost site.

He's probably waiting for it to just blow over on its own. This is the internet after all and he is, as has been noted above VERY conversant with how things work.

@moleyuk: Well I don't mind commenting once per day on his article and reminding him "Hello, X times 24 hours have passed since you promised to update the article and we're still waiting" lol.

All of this. And most of your other statements. I appreciate your tone of moderation.

I like to think that the GB Community can turn shitstorms into mudhuts.

You guys should be sure to point out, in your tweets and posts, that GIANTBOMB IS OWNED BY CBS INTERACTIVE. That would likely get a bit more attention than just "that stuff was taken from some middly website you might not know about".

Wow, just saw this. What a shit show. -_-

It's disgusting and I don't believe this is anything new, either. They claim they just launched last month, but didn't we have a whole thread about them launching this and copying content a year or two ago? I swear we did. At any rate, as gross and pathetic as it is, I can only get so upset about it. I mean, it's not my job to get upset over it or make people accountable. That's Giant Bomb's job and CBS's job. They have billions of dollars and plenty of lawyers and its in their business interest -- not mine. So if they're not going to bother doing anything about it, no point in me giving a shit.

It's still pretty dumb that they're going to continue to be credited as "the first", though. You know, even though they're at least half a decade late to the game.

@moleyuk: I agree. He'll probably just hunker down and try to wait it out. Given how upfront he is on his LinkedIn page about using link-bait articles to drive traffic to sites, I doubt that he's actually apologetic in the least about the article, but I'm willing to give the guy time to consider his actions and provide a response.

I agree. Take the high road, GB.

Wow, just saw this. What a messed up situation.

I did get a brief response from Drew Hendricks on Twitter:

@chasepettit my affiliation is with VGChartz as they are allowing me to write about video games and I found GameWise in the process.

@chasepettit I don't get paid for anything that I write on any of these

EDIT: These tweets have been subsequently deleted.

@chaser324: I find it hard to believe that one of his colleagues just happens to work for GameWise and he only stumbled upon it.

I have put in a request to the editors at HuffPo to delete my article. I'm sorry everyone.

@chaser324: I deleted the tweets to let the flames cool. Like I said in my previous message, I emailed the editors at HuffPo to delete the article.

@drewh: Very classy move. Much appreciated by the GB community.

@drewh: Didn't you tweet that you were out of town? And why delete the article? People in this thread demanded for some transparency as to what the site is doing with GiantBomb's data. Or is your connection to the staff what prompted you to want it deleted?

@apathylad: Not sure why you're trying to push this even farther. I don't have time at the moment to go through the process of updating the entire piece. I'd be happy to write an article over GB in the future with all the proper facts. My connect to VGChartz has nothing to do with the article. You're acting as though there is some major conspiracy behind this when it was my fault for not doing enough research ad I'd never seen GameWise before and I'd never heard of this site before. Please take my most sincerest apology and the best I can do for now is delete the current piece and do a re-write or an article over GB in the future.

@drewh: I'm sure you can figure yourself how your behavior and MasterVG's one has become suspicious in our community's eyes. All this story is quite a mess in general, to be honest. Anyway, speaking for my self I take your apologies for really sincere and I'll be waiting for the article to be deleted and hopefully for a new and "brighter" one. Else, you'll always find a reminder signed Pasquale Paletta, lol.

Have a good one.

If the article goes, that would be apology enough for me.

It doesn't excuse Gamewise's actions, though.

I'm going to make the assumption that all was just an honest mistake and suggest that, perhaps, an article discussing all sorts of different available game databases might be interesting and worthwhile? Everything from vgreleases.com and howlongtobeat.com to GiantBomb and so on.

If there is really a relation between you and the site involved, then that's shady (or, rather, it appears shady, no matter what). If you're addressing numerous available sites (and especially if you disclose any relation you may have to some), covering many of them in a single piece would be both worthwhile to your readers and fair as far as any potential shadiness could be concerned. It's that relationship that is really the only questionable element, to me. The origin of the content on the other site (which I swear has been around for over a year and was known to be flat out using data dumps from GiantBomb's API back then . . . .?) sucks, but is not exactly something I would expect an author of a piece to know or suspect until someone else raised it to your attention.

@porkellain: I do not know why I pretended to not be an admin at Gamewise, which in hindsight, was a stupid move. I know I should have been open from the beginning, but I guess I might have just wanted to avoid confrontation. Everything else I have said has been true, though. I am still going through the character pages and noting which ones have copied content, either deleting or rewriting the content there.

Coming back to this thread I must say I'm quite pleased with how things played out. I'm proud of my GB duders for not turning this into an unholy shitstorm and keeping it reasonably calm. On another forum in another community this could have gone way worse. Game on duders.

@mastervg71782: As I take drewh's apologies as sincere, I'm willing to understand your point of view, although I think that sucking it up and being clear is the best way to handle things, especially in your position as admin. Anyway, I'm talking for myself only.

@drewh: has apologized and the article will go down, so that seems to be taken care of.

On the other hand, I still find hard to believe that the data pulled off from Giant Bomb is the work of a few users and not something more automated and scripted. Gamewise owners still have some explanation to do and apologies to make.

@porkellain: I'm sure the two admins from Gamewise that have posted here have little or no knowledge of how that GiantBomb data came to be on the site. They've been pretty honest and forthcoming about their efforts to get rid of the copy/pasted data, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their actions are all on the up and up. It's likely that only the Gamewise staff and engineers would be aware of any use of the GB API to seed their site, and I imagine if they're going to discuss that with anyone, it's probably only going to be privately with Giant Bomb staff.

So I have wayyyy too much time on my hands (currently flatsitting in London) and felt a little sorry that Drew Hendricks and the two Gamewise admins are taking all the heat for this.

So from what I can gather the guy behind Gamewise is likely Brett Walton founder of VGchartz and GamrReview http://www.gamrreview.com/the-team/ Gamewise is listed under his current projects in his LinkedIn profile.

Brett Walton's Projects

• Gamewise

  • September 2011 to Present
  Team Members: Brett Walton, Dean Walton

  Gamewise is a leading online destination for the creation and sharing of user-created video game knowledge and discussion. Launched to the public in January 2013, Gamewise offers a searchable database of more than 45,000 games and more than 125,000 gaming-related entities created and edited by the Gamewise user community.

So if @snide or anyone on the legal team is serious about querying the data acquisition they might want to start with him or drop him a tweet at least he goes by @Broshnat on there......... and just as I typed that it looks like he may have made an account here under that name Feb 2009.

I just spent the past hour reading through all of this thread, time to get back to studying. I would imagine whatever happens now will probably be private, but man was reading through what happened entertaining. As some users pointed out, good on the community for not being the typical raging internet users after learning about this.

@chaser324: I totally agree with your point. I guess that from now on I'll be less active on the matter, I'll just check out Hendricks' article because you know... it has to be done lol. And yea, much probably it will be a thing between the staffs now, although I like to think that we as a whole community did something great, we moved together and "solved the mystery" somehow. Time to go to bed, it's fokken late here lol. Good night peeps.

On a whole you guys have been understanding, except for a select few who think swearing and threats of attack are the way to handle these matters. The admins will slowly be making their way through checking all content, and we are focusing on using the contributor tracking to make sure that this issue does not come up again.

Hey guys I was just over at this website gamewise or something and I noticed a bunch of stuff was similar. We should try an......

oh

never mind.

I don't believe this was done with the Giant Bomb API. But it was done very early in the site's life.

1. 'Splosion Man
2. .hack
3. 101 Dalmatians
4. 101-in-1 Megamix
5. 1080 Snowboarding
6. 110 Clevere Spiele
7. 1213
8. 1500DS Spirits
9. 18 Wheels of Steel
10. 1942

Those are the first franchises ever created on Gamewise, as evidenced by their numeric IDs. It goes on like this, but those are the first ten. It bears much resemblance to Giant Bomb's alphabetic list of franchises. What other site has dedicated pages for obscure series like 110 Clevere Spiele?

The most recent franchise listed on Gamewise is Where's My Water?, which was created on June 6, 2012. Payday was created on June 7 and is absent from the site. Other franchises created later are also absent. From this we can conclude that the data was scraped on either June 6 or June 7.

Gamewise opened for testing later that same month. The data was already present before they let users in. That's why MasterVG and Krystal didn't notice the systemic plagiarism in progress. This happened not just before they became admins, but before they became users.

@LordAndrew so what does that mean?

@the_laughing_man: It means the data was there before they started allowing in beta users, and likely the text as well. It means that the two admins who showed up in this thread were not involved. It also means that it was not done with the API, as the pages were created alphabetically at a time when the API could only sort by creation date. And finally it means that the guy who who tipped us off ten months ago was not actually aware of the plagiarism since it hadn't happened yet.

<p>@LordAndrew I tossed that info up on reddit.</p><p>Does anyone recall any strange website stuff around the time this stuff might have been pulled?</p>

I remember creating the Where's My Water? franchise page, but I don't recall having any difficulty doing so. I think the site was about as stable as it usually is. I don't remember what the next day was like.

So the creator of Gamewise manually added this data?

@SexyToad that would have taken lots of time. And does not explain the Giantbomb images.

@LordAndrew so this might point to the admins using a separate scraping script?

This looks like some juicy shit but man, I can't read 500 posts. tldr?

Has CBS or GB said anything or are we doing all the sleuthing for them?

@lordandrew: Do you know where you found it? The Water