MasterVG71782

@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.

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

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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/

Twitter is acting up on me, so I created an account here. Before Gamewise went live, there was a period where only a handful of people created content. After that, it went into a beta period where it was opened up to about 30-40 people. During these two periods, there was no point system and everything was done under anonymity, so there was no way to know who added content to the site. Note that this beta period was when I joined and towards the end is when I became an admin. It seems that this period is when most of this content was added.

The site went live a few months ago and certain systems were put into place, like the point system you see now, as well as a section for admins to monitor content. Points are given for anything you do to the site, even going through content already there and adding links. Not everyone who added content before are still with the site; in fact, I don't think anyone besides 1 or 2 are still there. With a focus on adding new content, there was no real way to go back through tens of thousands of entities and seeing what was copied or not without wasting a lot of time.

I hate plagiarism as much as anyone, as I have had content stolen from guides I have written for GameFAQs years ago. There's no real way to really know who added that content. Now that it has been brought to our attention, it is being removed whether you believe it's "being hidden" or not. It is a lot of time wasted indeed going back through all of the content, looking to see if it was copied, then removing/editing it if it is. I'm putting my own time away from my own projects on the site to do this.