The cunts.
Gamewise.co importing assets from GiantBomb
@snail:slow to comment as your name implies, neat.
@the_laughing_man: He seems like a mad man - no lie
I think its useless to talk to lamplight on reddit any more. He seems like a over zelous forum user who is upset that where he goes is dieing after being there huge amounts of time. His moby ID has like the highest post count on the entire site.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1925ra/gamewise_is_scraping_information_from_giantbomb/c8kdjwr
Your move lamplight
Are you deliberately confusing me with someone from Gamewise? I merely pointed out some of the origins of Giant Bomb because I used to contribute to MobyGames. I provided some information about what happened that period in 2008 and how Giant Bomb got its head start with content. Whatever went on beyond that, or what Gamewise is doing, is completely unrelated to me. I'll gladly share what I know, but that makes no sense at all.
I think its useless to talk to lamplight on reddit any more. He seems like a over zelous forum user who is upset that where he goes is dieing after being there huge amounts of time. His moby ID has like the highest post count on the entire site.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1925ra/gamewise_is_scraping_information_from_giantbomb/c8kdjwr
Your move lamplight
Are you deliberately confusing me with someone from Gamewise? I merely pointed out some of the origins of Giant Bomb because I used to contribute to MobyGames. I provided some information about what happened that period in 2008 and how Giant Bomb got its head start with content. Whatever went on beyond that, or what Gamewise is doing, is completely unrelated to me. I'll gladly share what I know, but that makes no sense at all.
SHIT HE FOUND ME
@SexyToad GET HIM!
@snail:slow to comment as your name implies, neat.
I'm secretly RP-ing in these forums, don't tell anyone.
I seriously only read about this today though.
I don't know why we're attacking Sciere/lampligtmistake. I for one am thankful for the work he has done contributing to MobyGames. When I'm adding new games or releases to the database, MobyGames is one of my main sources along with GameFAQs. We need sites like MobyGames and people like Sciere putting in hard work on those sites. We wouldn't have nearly as much data without the work Sciere has done. We have people putting huge amounts of time into Giant Bomb's wiki too. Does that somehow make them nutjobs? I hope not.
What about the accusations that Giant Bomb took down MobyGames while scraping data from it? Sounds plausible to me. If you look at the data exposed by the Giant Bomb API, you can see the first game page was created on 2008-04-01 01:32:48. The thousandth game page was created on 2008-04-01 01:38:06. That's one thousand page creations in a span of less than six minutes. The five thousandth game page? 2008-04-01 01:51:14. Does nobody see how this could be a problem?
@lamplightmistake: Hey lamplightmistake, welcome to Giantbomb, hopefully after all this mess you'll find yourself comfy even in our community. Although what GB did in the beginning hasn't been the nicest thing on Earth, I hope you understand that there's a HUGE difference between the two cases. The info that Giantbomb has scraped from Mobygames is stuff that could be collected somewhere else. I mean, Moby wasn't the only place in which one can find release dates, pictures and such, the same as Giantbomb isn't right? Again, it hasn't been a fair thing and what has been scraped is now gone for the most part, AFAIK. What is happening with Gamewise is completely different, pages and pages of wiki that has been written by the very hands of the members of this community and have been copypasted without any shame to Gw's database. We're not against other wikis, it's just the fact that we've also been tricked by the author of the HuffPost's article, who advertised a site which he's tied to and then lied to us telling that he was going to update the story and tell the truth. I know that any aficionado wants to defend what he cares most for, but be a reasonable person like I think you are and try to understand what's really wrong on the matter. Who knows maybe, you'll become one of the best contributors of this site one day :) Meanwhile, enjoy your stay.
PS. I don't think that laughing man was pointing at you with that reddit link.
PPS. Sorry for the parts in which i talk about "we", just hope I'm representing the general thoughts going on here.
The reddit link is about the admin acting like an idiot.
The your move thing was me needing to go to work.
@lamplightmistake: Hey lamplightmistake, welcome to Giantbomb, hopefully after all this mess you'll find yourself comfy even in our community. Although what GB did in the beginning hasn't been the nicest thing on Earth, I hope you understand that there's a HUGE difference between the two cases. The info that Giantbomb has scraped from Mobygames is stuff that could be collected somewhere else. I mean, Moby wasn't the only place in which one can find release dates, pictures and such, the same as Giantbomb isn't right? Again, it hasn't been a fair thing and what has been scraped is now gone for the most part, AFAIK. What is happening with Gamewise is completely different, pages and pages of wiki that has been written by the very hands of the members of this community and have been copypasted without any shame to Gw's database. We're not against other wikis, it's just the fact that we've also been tricked by the author of the HuffPost's article, who advertised a site which he's tied to and then lied to us telling that he was going to update the story and tell the truth. I know that any aficionado wants to defend what he cares most for, but be a reasonable person like I think you are and try to understand what's really wrong on the matter. Who knows maybe, you'll become one of the best contributors of this site one day :) Meanwhile, enjoy your stay.
@lordandrew: Once again, I completely agree. We're not at odds with MobyGames. It's unfortunate that there appears to be bad blood between the two sites, but we're not enemies.
@lamplightmistake: Hey watch this 'Best of GBQL 25: Big Jeffrey' it's a pretty entertaining and fun loving site.
Big Jeffrey always says, "Drop 'em."
@winternet said:
This thread is slowly going nowhere.
@winternet said:
This thread is slowly going nowhere.
Well, what were you expecting, a blood bath? We can't do nothing more than what we already did, just wait for updates from the staff.
Or maybe keep poking Hendricks until he says the damn truth.
The reason that a lot of the admin team and owners have not replied to this is not to ignore the issue, it is to avoid having to make a stupid account on a site that wishes to sit there and flame them for issue that was out of their control to track and find until this recent article.
Gamewise is aware of the issue and is slowly working their way through the mess to delete any information that is inappropriate or copied, not to cover their tracks. Unfortunately it is hard for a small few to find and delete information that was previously entered.
MVG and myself are admins that only started working for the site a few months ago, therefore we have little understanding of what the site was in beta. Our focus is to add wikia type information and walkthroughs for all new and upcoming games, while hoping that users will fill in, delete, or replace any old game information.
Rather than sitting around flaming, why not delete the information you can prove was copy and pasted into the site. Be aware that a lot of pages have original content that should NOT be deleted, such as the Borderlands 2, Assassin's Creed pages, Disgaea pages, most of the information for upcoming games, etc. There is a lot of hard work put into Gamewise by its staff and users who should not be punished or deleted because of some stuff that happened in beta.
I understand your frustration, as a lot of the current admin team has had their walkthroughs stolen an sold as ebooks on amazon, and this is why we are putting forth the effort and unpaid time to delete all the inappropriate content.
@krystal109: No one wanted or expected the owners to come here to explain this situation. This is not the place to do so. That said, an explanation and a set of apologies is the bare minimum that they should do.
The reason that a lot of the admin team and owners have not replied to this is not to ignore the issue, it is to avoid having to make a stupid account on a site that wishes to sit there and flame them for issue that was out of their control to track and find until this recent article.
Rather than sitting around flaming, why not delete the information you can prove was copy and pasted into the site. Be aware that a lot of pages have original content that should NOT be deleted, such as the Borderlands 2, Assassin's Creed pages, Disgaea pages, most of the information for upcoming games, etc. There is a lot of hard work put into Gamewise by its staff and users who should not be punished or deleted because of some stuff that happened in beta.
I understand your frustration, as a lot of the current admin team has had their walkthroughs stolen an sold as ebooks on amazon, and this is why we are putting forth the effort and unpaid time to delete all the inappropriate content.
Good job, coming in and insulting the site, very professional of you.
So your solution for your problem is that we, the rightful creators of content stolen from us should go and fix it for you?
Maybe, instead of taking this as an affront on your time you should look at it as the affront on our rights and wishes that it is.
Good job, coming in and insulting the site, very professional of you.
So your solution for your problem is that we, the rightful creators of content stolen from us should go and fix it for you?
Maybe, instead of taking this as an affront on your time you should look at it as the affront on our rights and wishes that it is.
Nice way to read that. I am wondering where you got an insult from all that.
I am saying that, as someone who has had my work stolen and sold on amazon, I have had to put forth the effort to have that information taken down. If you want the work taken down from Gamewise, then stop flaming and either do it yourself or stop "hiding" your findings. Every time you guys have pointed out an issue in the open, we have agreed that it was a copy and pasted by a previous user and taken it down. If you would like something taken down, you need only ask, since it is your right to not have your information taken without your permission.
I have nothing against GB or it's users, but I have an issue with the methods of approaching having your information taken down and assuming we are "covering our tracks".
@krystal109: No-one here is disputing that there have been genuine users and admin updating Gamewise or implying that they or their work should suffer for the action of whoever was involved with what seems fairly obviously to be a concerted, automated removal of Giant Bomb's user content.
From some of the behaviour and actions of the admin staff on here and on twitter however it paints a worrying picture of how your website is run. Yourself and MVG started only recently so understandably don't have answers to some of the earlier behaviour of the website's contributors but could you maybe enlighten us as to how the website is currently operated and who you report to and how seriously they may be taking the allegations. At the moment it seems like it's you two guys sitting in a room going 'Oh Shit'.
If you've experienced this kind of thing before, shouldn't you have detected and dealt with this months ago. Instead you and your fellow admins left an absurd amount of plagiarized content just sitting on the site. Have you ever wondered how your site got SO MANY PAGES?
Good job, coming in and insulting the site, very professional of you.
So your solution for your problem is that we, the rightful creators of content stolen from us should go and fix it for you?
Maybe, instead of taking this as an affront on your time you should look at it as the affront on our rights and wishes that it is.
Nice way to read that. I am wondering where you got an insult from all that.
I am saying that, as someone who has had my work stolen and sold on amazon, I have had to put forth the effort to have that information taken down. If you want the work taken down from Gamewise, then stop flaming and either do it yourself or stop "hiding" your findings. Every time you guys have pointed out an issue in the open, we have agreed that it was a copy and pasted by a previous user and taken it down. If you would like something taken down, you need only ask, since it is your right to not have your information taken without your permission.
I have nothing against GB or it's users, but I have an issue with the methods of approaching having your information taken down and assuming we are "covering our tracks".
To be fair, I don't think he/she was insulting us.
But when we did first come upon a page that plagiarized content, it was deleted pretty quickly. It looked a lot like you guys were trying to hide something. Every time we had a screenshot, the content was just deleted. Also the mass amount of content is the issue. It wasn't just a couple of pages. The process looks automated, its hard to believe that users did this.
...Every time you guys have pointed out an issue in the open, we have agreed that it was a copy and pasted by a previous user and taken it down...
I have nothing against GB or it's users, but I have an issue with the methods of approaching having your information taken down and assuming we are "covering our tracks".
The "covering your tracks" idea probably comes from early in the thread yesterday when any pages that were found to be blatant copies were quietly edited with no comment as people posted. Only after it spread to reddit and twitter battles did MasterVG post on it.
If you are really a new admin (along with mastervg though his behaviour (and knowledge of web design/management) is a little sketchy, see: completely contradictory statements on comments and twitter with same account) who has nothing to do with the old content added, then I sympathize with you having to go through and clean out the database, but I would have to ask why you put yourself through such a thing. I have been paid well to sanitize data before and I did not enjoy it then, I could never imagine doing it for free.
You refer to content "...copy and pasted by a previous user..." but from various pages with malformed formatting and placeholder images showing the giantbomb logo it would be difficult to argue that it was not some sort of API import or scrape that added a lot of that information automatically - e.g. not something a user is likely to do just for fun, but something someone might do to pad out a new database website they are running.
I think what people are looking for is some statement from someone in a dev or ownership position of gamewise - someone in a position where they should have been aware of ripping another site's wiki for essentially the same purpose. While some people (e.g. zFUBARz) seem to be unable to distinguish whotever scraped the site from people hired on later, hopefully the general sentiment is not to attack admins who had nothing to do with that content. I don;t know what kind of contact you have with devs/owners etc. as an admin but surely someone else should be doing damage control. As I mentioned above all we have seen is MasterVG and yourself, both of who claim to be unrelated to this huge amount of scraped data.
I am not aware of any behavior on Twitter, as I hate social media websites like Twitter and Facebook, and had no idea of who DrewH was when the Huffington article was posted. As it is now, the team works mostly on a job claim system, in which the owners post upcoming games they want wikia information or walkthroughs for. The staff can then claim those and write them up for payment. The focus for both staff and owners is currently on new and upcoming games... and older games are getting very little coverage with staff edits. This is a major reason why a lot of these issues were not found.
I think you guys are not realizing that Gamewise was in beta for a very long time. It is not a matter of a ton of pages being made in a few weeks, you are talking about a lot of pages being copy and pasted over months.
Then there is the issue of the information remaining. As was stated previously, there used to be no way of tracking changes in beta, therefore there would be no way to know what was and wasn't updated. When the new staff came in, we were not aware of this and only worked on games we were interested in, mostly upcoming games, and rarely looked at a lot of older and possibly obscure games.
As I said before, this is no excuse. We are deleting or replacing the information as it is brought to our attention because it rightful should not be there.
Here is how things went down:
Article goes up giving Gamewise big viewership on a large news platform.
It is found out that a VAST majority of Gamewise wiki content is ripped from Giantbomb.
I posted on the Huffington Post article to bring this to the author "Drew Hendricks" attention.
Almost IMMEDIATELY any link that was at the beginning of this forum topic saw the information removed.
There was no ADMIN or staff from Gamewise that came here to say "sorry guys we will take care of it"
"Drew Hendricks" responds to me on twitter and makes an account here reassuring us that he will be updating the story and asks us to cool off.
Instead there was new accounts popping up on n4g and the Huffington Post article saying how awesome and useful Gamewise is, and that they would tell their friends. Also telling us from Giantbomb to stop being babies about our content being stolen.
So we started collecting and correlating information and screencaptures of stolen content that PEOPLE IN THIS THREAD themselves added.
Then it was found out that the AUTHOR "Drew A Hendricks" has a direct link to Gamewise through the Editor In Chief of GamrReview (which "Drew A Hendricks" is a staff member of) "Craig Snow" who also happens to be listed as an EDITOR for Gamewise.
So at this point we have a Blogger for the Huffington Post write up a SHINNING article about a colleges Game wiki website likening it to IMDB and touting its great accomplishments for only being a month old...without disclosing his relationship with the site.
We then have Akimitsu982 post on the Huffington Post article this:
looks like just another user from Gamewise trying to stick up for it. Ok thats what we are doing as well here at Giantbomb.
Then @MasterVG71782 comes here explaining that he is an ADMIN at Gamewise and tells us a bunch of excuses but that he is working hard to get things removed.
HERE IS THE FUNNY PART!!!
<-------This guy who is playing the pleb, is actually this guy------->
@MasterVG71782 !!!!!
So here we are, 2 days later.
-No update to the article
-the author has ties to the website in question
-the author is not responding on twitter
-@MasterVG71782 has been deceptive about who he is
-you are grudgingly doing your job of removing plagiarized material from your site
-no apology, explanation that actually makes sense, and the joke of a praising blog post continues to make its rounds. except for now game news sites are picking up on this fiasco.
and we should just shut up why?
To be fair, I don't think he/she was insulting us.
I'm sure it wasn't the intent, but the phrasing of
it is to avoid having to make a stupid account on a site that wishes to sit there and flame them
Along with his general tone of indignation that I took insult with, I think for the most part, you guys have done fantastic work of keeping things pretty calm, this community is on the whole pretty reliable and mature compared to the shit storm that is usually the internet. I don't think he really gets how good they have it so far, if we were 4chan or something his site would be full of lolli porn at this point.
Good job, coming in and insulting the site, very professional of you.
So your solution for your problem is that we, the rightful creators of content stolen from us should go and fix it for you?
Maybe, instead of taking this as an affront on your time you should look at it as the affront on our rights and wishes that it is.
Nice way to read that. I am wondering where you got an insult from all that.
I am saying that, as someone who has had my work stolen and sold on amazon, I have had to put forth the effort to have that information taken down. If you want the work taken down from Gamewise, then stop flaming and either do it yourself or stop "hiding" your findings. Every time you guys have pointed out an issue in the open, we have agreed that it was a copy and pasted by a previous user and taken it down. If you would like something taken down, you need only ask, since it is your right to not have your information taken without your permission.
I have nothing against GB or it's users, but I have an issue with the methods of approaching having your information taken down and assuming we are "covering our tracks".
Are you just another MasterVG71782 alt?
This entire situation is utterly ridiculous. Giant Bomb logos, wholesale copying of content (ocassionally with peculiar unintuitive formatting), findings disappearing moments after being posted here, an article praising a site with ties to the author, admins of your site masquerading as others, and now your touting flaming on our part in a shallow attempt to turn this entire situation around on this thread and site.
As if the integrity of your site's database is the responsibility of users on this site to maintain and that their investigation and amassing of evidence is "flaming".
You say that the issue was out of their control to track and find until the article. How is that exactly? The article was praising your site, not whistleblowing any mass ripping of content.
@krystal109: First of all thank you for providing your point of view and shedding some light on the internals over on your website. Of course you should understand that the quiet removal of any page that was mentioned in this thread seemed somewhat shady. Also the huffpost article incident is kind of messed up - 24h and counting.
I think if you keep looking through your stuff and remove plagiarized content as you find it or when its requested, its the best way to handle this situation. Just don't point with the finger at GB users and tell them to quit whining and start cleaning your site. If you really weren't aware of anything, I can understand that you're upset with all the work you put into your site. But no one of us can really tell for sure what happened and we're certainly not the ones your anger should be directed to.
Lets quit accusing each other. We'll see how things get sorted out. I'm gonna play some games now :)
Perhaps flaming is a wrong term, but I would assume calling us thieves and intentionally covering our tracks flaming. Also the calling us cunts and saying shit like "let's go kick their ass".
I am not referring the the "evidence gathering". It is your right to find and ask for that information to be deleted.
Perhaps flaming is a wrong term, but I would assume calling us thieves and intentionally covering our tracks flaming. Also the calling us cunts and saying shit like "let's go kick their ass".
I am not referring the the "evidence gathering". It is your right to find and ask for that information to be deleted.
Those comments are directed toward the person(s) who copied the content. If you had nothing to do with that then you have nothing to be defensive about. I realize people are generalizing toward the site but it's not like it's transparent who is managing what. If you are just cleaning up the mess then personally I respect the effort.
I would still be interested in hearing about all the data got over there to begin with. Surely someone over there knows.
I can understand that tensions are flaring on both sides and I appreciate that Krystal109 came in here to join the conversation, but for the love of god both sides need to keep it civil. No insults, no attacks. This will most quickly be fixed when people calm down. I don't exactly trust MasterVG after he tried to pretend he wasn't a mod but this far, Krystal109 has, other than a minor altercation, been cooperative. If she's being honest and is deleting pages when she find they've been plagiarized then I see no reason to attack her. And, honestly, the GameWise mods don't really owe an apology. The guy who runs the site does as this appears to have happened under his watch. Let's not throw accusations until we get more info and focus on documenting the instances of plagiarism we find.
I wouldn't expect much in the way of journalistic integrity from Drew Hendricks given that the following is a summary of his LinkedIn Job background:
• Crack social website algorithms to provide the highest ROI.
• Maintain relationships with webmasters to generate guest blog posts.
• Create social marketing strategies for the release of new products.
• Implement social friendly plugins into websites to generate user activity.
• Managed multiple college and career school website campaigns.
• Implement SEO and Analytics tracking on client websites.
• Develop new and innovative social media websites for individual college and career school websites.
• Create linkbait articles that can be used on client websites to generate backlinks and build website authority.
• Extensive Keyword Research to create optimized content.
• Maintain multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts for colleges and career schools.
• Implement unique ideas for college and career school websites to generate extra inquiries.
• Enhance social bookmarking profiles to gain a following of over 10,000 active users.
• Create multiple articles for Basecamp Project Management and promote them across multiple social bookmarking sites to enhance traffic and conversions.
• Developed an affiliate website for a web video product called Talk Fusion.
• Created a social media website for lymphedema patients.
• Spoke on multiple Planet Ocean Communications Inc. webinars where different social media sites and algorithms were discussed.
@bob_loblaw said:
• Crack social website algorithms to provide the highest ROI.
• Maintain relationships with webmasters to generate guest blog posts.
• Create social marketing strategies for the release of new products.
• Create linkbait articles that can be used on client websites to generate backlinks and build website authority.
• Extensive Keyword Research to create optimized content.
Wow...some of that is surprisingly honest. Is this what every video game media guy's resume looks like?
I wouldn't expect much in the way of journalistic integrity from Drew Hendricks given that the following is a summary of his LinkedIn Job background:
• Create linkbait articles that can be used on client websites to generate backlinks and build website authority.
I don't want to come down too hard on the guy (though some of those listings are hilarious), but seeing "linkbait" used in a non-derisive sense just makes me sad. Sadly it's probably pretty successful if the average internet news site is to be believed.
@nyxfe: Totally, I'm sure he's just trying to earn a living like the rest of us, just pretty striking how up front you can be about the nefarious arts of social media manipulation and not really how he presented himself upfront.
@nyxfe: Totally, I'm sure he's just trying to earn a living like the rest of us, just pretty striking how up front you can be about the nefarious arts of social media manipulation and not really how he presented himself upfront.
Yeah, hopefully he doesn't get hit too hard for this. I doubt he knew the site ripped off content when he wrote the article but not mentioning his connection with the EIC is still a bit shady.
The only one who deserves any real ire is whoever ripped the content/wrote the script to do so, and even then I don't think he needs his life destroyed as some posters on here would imply.
At this point I'm just interested in hearing the whole story, from some dude scraping GB to weird responses from "new" admins and a beta site that lacks a seriously key component to a wiki (tracking user edits). It's a fascinating saga.
So, who said that the thread was slowly going nowhere?
Also:
Toasting in epic bread.
It had to be said.
The insanity in this thread is high, so maybe things are getting resolved, but I still wanted to post in a quite frankly "purple" thread.
So, who said that the thread was slowly going nowhere?
Also:
Toasting in epic bread.
It had to be said.
So says Mr. Stewart
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