Plagiarism is something that’s become a mainstay on the Internet. Why do your own work when you can just lift it from somewhere else? Nobody’s going to find out. That is, until they do. Gamewise, called “the IMDb of video games” by Huffington Post, has been getting slammed over at the Giant Bomb forums. Why? Turns out that a rather suspicious number of Gamewise articles, images, and other tidbits appear to have been lifted straight from Giant Bomb. Oops.
For those that might not know, the Giant Bomb Wiki is full of video game information on characters, developers, and specific games. It’s not like they’re the only wiki covering video games, but they are a rather well-known one. Gamewise, on the other hand, launched just last month. These kind of projects absolutely depend on user contributions, which can lead to vast swathes of data being improperly cited at best, and straight up stolen at worst.
Well, looks like Gamewise is guilty of the latter, though I’m sure there’s plenty of the former as well. That’s not saying Giant Bomb, or any wiki, is a paragon of ethics, but scraping entire articles at a time is just inexcusable. There have also been certain instances presented of images being directly lifted from Giant Bomb, but only a few are really definitive.Ā This thread on the Giant Bomb forums is chock full of comparison screenshots, but here’s one particularly good example from user NakAttack:
That’s the summary for John G. Vignocchi on Giant Bomb.
And that’s the overview for the same person over at Gamewise.
The Giant Bomb thread makes for a fascinating read. Turns out that the writer of the Huffington Post article that originally drew attention to Gamewise, Drew Hendricks, is or was affiliated with gamrReview. He appears over on their staff page, even. gamrReview just so happens to fall under the same umbrella as Gamewise. Make of that what you will.
In the end, Gamewise appears to be removing content as quickly as Giant Bomb folks point out similarities, but the sheer amount of duplicated work speaks to a larger, more sinister intention. The whole thing’s just icky.
(via Giant Bomb)
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