Gamewise.co importing assets from GiantBomb

Considering they're in the process of deleting all the offending content (ie. almost everything on the site) I don't really see what else there is to do other than make every page say PENISPENISPENISPENISPENISPENISPENISPENISPENISPENISPENISPENISPENIS or something similar, and that isn't really helping anyone.

Oh I am sure this will go well.

So how many pages on this site are basically pulled straight from Wikipedia?

The mods here do their jobs when checking content and the users chip in as well.

It's not very believable that a user would add a huge amount of data, that he/she took from other sites. Also once again, how do you explain this? The same information appears on Gamewise but with weird formatting. Almost looks automated.

@MasterVG71782 Thank you for offering some info on how all this might have started. I still feel though that Drew Hendricks need to edit his article disclosing his involvement.

Whatever helps you sleep at night dude. There is just no way that a user went through the trouble of uploading poorly formatted exact copies of pages from Giant Bomb complete with filler images for images that do not exist yet. I just makes no sense at all. If I'm trying to plagiarize Giant Bomb's content, why would I upload images of the Giant Bomb logo along with the stolen writing? It seems like a lot of extra work just to show for certain that the content was stolen.

@prestonhedges said:

Hopefully none, by now. The mods and users are usually pretty damn quick to remove them.

@mastervg71782: Thanks for the info, but the issue of not being able to attribute the plagiarism to a particular user isn't really even the issue here.

As I see it, the majority of the site's content appears to have been pulled en masse from Giant Bomb using the publicly available API. I find it hard to believe that a single user or even a small group of users could have entered this data manually, especially in such a systematic and consistent way, so it more than likely had to be an automated process. Since it doesn't appear that GameWise has a public API for adding content, it's hard to view the site's rampant plagiarism as anything other than the result of automated processes used by the site's creators to seed pages with stolen content.

@sexytoad: Information that appears on the front page of an entity doesn't follow any formatting used, so it looks that way and only the first two paragraphs are shown. When you click on Overview, the formatting should what the user used for the content that was uploaded.

@th3irdeye: I am not sure what happened with the GB images, as that was before my time.

@nickscorner: VGChartz was an all-in-one site that included a database for games, reviews and the sales figures that are there now. It was later split up into three separate sites, with VGChartz focusing on sales. Gamrreview was the first site created, which focuses on news stories, reviews and articles. Gamewise was the second site created, which you see is a gaming database that functions like a wiki. All three sites are run independently of each other, so I had no clue that the writer of that one post promoting Gamewise is a writer at the one other site.

In fact, it doesn't even look like he wrote anything for the site, as evidenced by http://www.gamrreview.com/author/drew-hendricks/

It's highly unusual that a user(s) on your site would add an image of the Giant Bomb logo for the image of developers. Do you have an explanation for that?

How long exactly was this beta period during which tens of thousands of 'entities' were entered into your database?

When did 'user access levels' become a factor? Were the three levels in there from the beginning or were they added after the beta period?

Why exactly was the focus of the site at launch adding more content when there was already tens of thousands of unchecked and potentially (and as we've seen, actually, in a great many cases) plagiarized content?

And it's good that you're spending your own time enforcing the rules of your site.

@chaser324: I apologize for not knowing what an API is and the content that was added by it being copied from this site. Like I said in my opening post, Gamewise was in development for a good 8+ months before it even went live. If there were 3-4 people doing this, wouldn't it be possible to do something like adding it manually? I know I recently caught someone who was copying stuff from a well known franchise's wiki and was able to push out 30-40 characters in the span of a few hours.

Wait, I am really confused. Are you saying that most of the sites information was added by the 30-40 people from the beta?

1. How can the site not keep up with 40 people posting full page articles? Surly, it would take at least a little time too actually write full pages of information.

Just a thought. What was the purpose of the Beta, if no one working for the site had the time to look at any of the pages posted by 40 people?

2. Clearly these 40 people must have amazing talent to write so many articles so quickly. It's a shame you have no idea who these people are. It's also strange that after these 40 people spent countless hours working on your website, 38 of them up and left, only two months after you launched.

I guess I just don't understand the how the internet works.

Good morning, what's up with the Huffpo article?

@mastervg71782: Is it possible that the data was entered manually by a few rogue users? I suppose so, but it's HIGHLY unlikely given the volume of plagiarized content and the systematic approach to copy/pasting that appears to have been applied. So, as I said in my other post, it's hard to view this as anything other than the result of the site's creators using the Giant Bomb API to automate the process of seeding the site with content, something which clearly violates the terms of service outlined here.

@theht: I do not have an explanation for the the GB logo, although I do remember that at one time, a URL was used to add images to the site, which has now changed and they come from the user's own computer. That might explain something like that, as there might have been an image on GB and it was changed/removed, resulting in the appearance of the GB logo.

As I mentioned, there was a period before the beta where there was a good 6 or so months where access was limited to only a handful of people. After that was the beta, which lasted a good 3-4 months. There aren't too many people from those periods that stuck around.

I'm not sure what you mean by "user access levels." If you were creating a site with such a scope and magnitude as this, wouldn't you try and focus on adding as much content as possible? With only a handful of admins, who all have their own projects to work on the site, it would have been a huge endeavor to go back and check everything.

For example, there are 19,000+ characters on the site and I have been going through them alphabetically, one by one, seeing which ones have stuff written for them and cross-referencing them with this site and other wikis. I am making a list of which ones have copied content and plan on changing/deleting that content myself at a later time. It is certainly a time-consuming process.

@mozzle: I was just a regular user back during the beta, only becoming an admin towards the end. There was no way of checking, at least for the basic admins, of who added content to the site. It was completely anonymous, hence the plethora of pages with no contributor listed.

I've only been an admin at the site for a couple of months and the way you see the site now isn't what it was back then. There wasn't an admin section that let us see when someone uploaded content. That "live update feed" on the Contributions tab was only added like a couple of weeks ago.

I'm thinking that any beta, for a game or even a website, is to try and find bugs and problems with the actual site itself and iron them out before they go out to the public. That 40 or so number I gave was an estimate, as I don't recall exactly how many, and I was just a regular contributor then, so I was excited to work on the site.

@mastervg71782: A lot of what you say makes sense. I just find it incredibly hard to believe that Gamewise site creators would not look at some new submissions as they came in. Especially because there were only 40 people submitting. I know if I put a new site into beta, I would be thrilled to watch what people were doing, and how my site was growing, due to these 40 people. It seems odd, that these forty people were invited in, but no one bothered to look at what they were doing. It's like there were thousands of people to keep track of.. there were forty.

And for some reason all but two left. But hey, I would probably leave to, if not one person actually working at Gamewise took the time to look at any of the hard work we had done.

I'm not saying that you personally are in the wrong, or that you're lying. I frankly have no idea, and I'd much rather assume the better of someone. What I am saying however, is all of this reeks of bullshit.

We here at Giantbomb are providing logical theories as to what is going on here, based on the evidence that we have. And every time someone from Gamewise tries to explain what really happened. It just seems more illogical and more fishy.

EDIT: I want to double clarify. I think you're alright. It must really suck to have hundreds of people shitting on you all of a sudden. I do not envy you, or blame you for plagiarism that has happened at Gamewise. I also want to thank you for taking the time to go through articles at Gamewise in order to check for plagiarism.

Are you certain that the url method of adding images for your site was hotlinking rather than downloading the image to your site?

Can you say if it was during the 3-4 months of the beta that the majority of the plagiarized entities were created? How were beta participants chosen? And how did the handful of people editing the site before the beta get access?

Your sites guidelines has a section outlining the three levels of user access that stipulate user editing abilities and the correlating level of edit monitoring. Are these levels something that was added after the beta? When did monitoring user edits become a principle for your site?

If I were creating or running a database website, I'd absolutely work to ensure that the integrity of every piece of content contained therein was sound, no matter how many pages there might be and how much time and energy it would take.

Sifting through the pages would probably take about as long as manually adding tens of thousands of pages, unless that was done somehow with Giant Bomb's API as has been pointed out.

Could you clarify this? I literally do not understand what you are trying to describe.

@starfoxa: I think he's just saying that you were previously able to add an image to GameWise via a url, but now all images posted must be uploaded from your computer.

None, if we can help it. If plagiarized content from any other site is found, it is removed and the user responsible for adding it has their wiki editing privileges revoked permanently.

In addition, there is a vetting process that we put users through who want to edit wiki pages. Until they reach 5,000 points, all of their submissions require approval from site staff, and part of that approval process is checking to see if the content has been ripped from some other site. Once a user reaches 5,000 points, they are granted live edit privileges and their submissions no longer require moderation. It is very, very rare that plagiarized material ends up on the site, and when it does, it doesn't stay there for very long.

Is that what you think Giant Bomb is? Wikipedia content reformatted?

@cirdain: Nothing yet although I'm sure somebody there is aware of what is going on.

@mastervg71782 I really cant believe anything you said. Sounds all like an not very well thought through excuse to cover up what obviosly happened. Sounds more like youre preparing for potential defense of legal action taken against your site. Testing out which excuses work...

Obviously for this massive copy operation to happen, the only valid explanation is, that it was automated by a script. And who in this world most likely would run such a script? The creators of this new released site of curse. No one likes to visit empty new sites. They had to fill it someway.

Get those CBS lawyers in there

I wonder if we'll get any official comment from GB in the near future.

I think Jeff's Tumblr will be all we get for a while.

Anonymous asked: Thoughts on this Gamewise site basically datascraping Giantbomb's Wiki to fill in their site?

We’re aware.

@mastervg71782: The main thing that makes this look like it was done by a script via the API, and not by users, is this:

Look at the Giant Bomb pages for Brian Rich and David Vallone. They have that same bomb image as their default image.

In the early days of Giant Bomb, every page needed a default image. You couldn't create pages without a default image. So for people who didn't have a readily available picture, users would workaround by uploading some other image. It was sometimes a question mark image, but in these cases, a person had used the Giant Bomb bomb logo. Those images have been on those pages for over four years.

Why would a user on Gamewise who was manually copying content from Giant Bomb, manually copy those default images? It's clearly not an image of the developer. That, and the sheer volume of stolen content, makes it look like some form of script was automatically ripping content from Giant Bomb.

Plus, I wouldn't say the plagiarism is the worst part of this. Plagiarism happens. People steal content on the internet. I'm used to it. The shadiest part is that Drew Hendricks, the guy who wrote that Huffington Post article, seems to be directly affiliated with the staff who run Gamewise. He failed to declare this in his article. That's a complete conflict of interest.

@zaccheus: Thanks. I always forget Jeff and Patrick tumblrs. I should bookmark them or something.

Even if its true it was some of the users from the beta now that you are public how are you gonna handle plagerism? If a handful of 40 did that much how are you gonna handle thousands? Maybe even millions of people?

@the_laughing_man: Why would 40 users voluntarily add so much content to a new site? They don't get money for it and they don't get fame, as no one knows this site. As they were copying form giantbomb, they were obviously aware that GB exists and that it does essentially the same as the new site. So if I want to contribute for the sake of it, why not simply use the site that already exists and write something new there? I cant figure out how this story of 40 users can make sense in any way.

I do not know whether you had any hand in developing the website or whatever, so do not take this as a personal attack, but as a web designer and programmer with years of experience I can tell you every excuse here is complete nonsense.

Firstly, even if you linked to a URL (that was later replaced with a default image for some unknown reason) the new image would have a unique URL due to the way image uploading is generally done. If you have a gallery of images, you don't replace old images with new ones, you upload and ID each one individually then change a variable in a database that points to the "main" image. Those images showing up are undoubtedly the result of some sort of automation (e.g. ripping from the API).

I have a hard time believing, as others have stated, that these hardcore (10s of thousands of articles) beta members just up and left at launch. Why put in all that "hard work" just to leave?

If I were creating a site with such scope and magnitude my focus would absolutely be on robustly tracking and controlling information flow. The site is about information added by users - wouldn't that be your main focus? Tracking and handling users as they add content? Anyone who has done one line of web design for a forward-facing site knows how obnoxious end users are with their information, and no respectable web developer would even think to let anyone edit content that went live without approval. This is practically begging for abuse. I'd be less surprised to see a hundred pages of porn than I am to see it ripping off GB.

If you are really just a user who became an admin I would save yourself the trouble of manually wiping pages. Let the owners and developers sort out this mess they've got.

Current administrators of a website are always responsible for the content on their site, regardless of whether they were the ones to put it there or not.

Pushing unknown rogue users or past administrators in front of you doesn't hide the fact that you allowed it to remain there, aiding in creating a false impression for your new users of a rich library of originally written/compiled wiki pages.

@jgf said:

I think some of you need to understand that there are other gaming wikis beyond just GiantBomb (Wikia being probably the best example).

If anything, Gamewise seems to be aimed at GameFAQs and Wikia than GiantBomb. Whilst it may be true that a lot of the character and company pages were lifted from here, the game pages bear no resemblance at all. Compare the following pages for Borderlands 2:

http://www.giantbomb.com/borderlands-2/3030-36055/
http://gamewise.co/games/5186/Borderlands-2

The GiantBomb page has an overview, story, gameplay, a list of characters, weapons, special editions and pc requirements. Most of it is general game info. Gamewise on the other hand has 406 pages of content about the game, it has the same kind of info as GiantBomb (although clearly original work) but goes into far more detail - challenges, easter egg guides, and a full walkthrough of all the main levels in the game and stuff like the hidden vault symbols. There's no way that 1 page of GiantBomb content can compare to 406 pages covering every minute detail of the game.

It is a totally different type of site to GiantBomb.

Every link you have leads to no where. And this seems oddly like an advertisement.

Welcome to the forums Cow_Down

a) Giant Bomb is much more than a video game wiki website.

b) We're not here to compare websites. We're here to talk about how gamewise is pulling off data from Giant Bomb.

c) Welcome new user. I hope you enjoy your stay here on Giant Bomb :)

The best thing to do now is probably to avoid the site. The less visits they get the closer they will come to not existing.

I second that, also I have NO intention to link my FB profile to that site. Anyway, I'm still waiting for the HuffPost to justify all this mess. Also, I hope that "Set Phasers to Yelling" will be an article about what's happening here.

@the_laughing_man said:

That's a step too far, someone burn these fuckers to the ground.

Really though, this is extremely disappointing since some people here (myself included) really put a lot of time into making the GB Wiki great. Hope the crew and CBSi get it taken care of.

That and forcing them to delete copied entries. I don't know the license of the Wiki contents, but someone mentioned CC or so. So as long as they give credit to the original author and don't use the API to copy, they may even be allowed to keep the content. But certainly not in its present form.

As shitty as this whole situation is, MasterVG deserves some credit for not ignoring the situation and actually responding.

A wiki like Gamewise or Giant Bomb doesn't get support unless the hardcore doesn't get behind it, fill it with content, and evangelize it to the more mainstream crowd. GB has its reputation on it's side while Gamewise's is all but completely tainted. If the admins of that site don't completely remove it's copied content, I say just let them keep it. That site isn't going to succeed, especially after all of this. Just let it wilt into obscurity and not give it an opportunity to be mentioned to the public via this debacle.

It doesn't work that way. Image files cannot be modified in any way once uploaded to Giant Bomb. In the very rare event that an image is deleted, an XML file will be served reporting an error. This would appear as a broken image on Gamewise.

That sounds like a really bad way to start a start a site. I would absolutely make sure I had a user account system and some manner of contribution tracking in place before letting forty people go on a content creation spree. If you let someone write anything, there's a chance they'll plagiarize. If you let forty people create content, and then never look to see what they're doing, then things get real bad.

Was a Fred Peterson part of the beta by any chance? Is it possible that he was aware of actual copying going on? If not him, surely someone among the forty could see what was happening. Did they not attempt to contact Craig Snow or whoever the admins were at the time to inform them of the plagiarism?

When you have a beta of 40 people and 38 leave, would you not want to know why? Did they find using the site unsatisfying because everything existed and had been written about already? Were they aware of the systematic plagiarism and annoyed by the lack of response from the site's admins?

If the plagiarism was not caused by action on the part of the admins, their non-action played a huge part in what happened. It's a hell of a way to launch a website.

@kinapuff: I second that. I don't like the constructed excuses, but this whole thing is not worth ruining someones life and suing them for huge sums of money. If I was one of those guys, the best way to handle the situation would be to directly contact one of the dudes in charge, e.g. Jeff. Explain everything, excuse for the wrong doing and remove/change the content as demanded by this person. The GB duders seem to be quite decent guys, so I'm sure if you talk to them in person, they wont want to destroy you and make you suffer. At least as long as you're not contacting Ryan Davis. For gods sake, don't contact him :D.

What about the guy on reddit that is supposed to be a Mobygames admin and claims about GB ripping info without authorization? Did our mods remove that content when they found out? Here is the link for the thread on Mobygames that states that, you gotta have an account to read it so I'm not going to look it myself, but can I have answers on this please?

@porkellain: This is where we find out Giant Bomb has copied everything from somewhere else? I can't read that link :/ Is it possible to quote it here if it isn't too long?