Author Topic: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?  (Read 1930 times)

rushingwind

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Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« on: June 23, 2011, 03:45:08 pm »
Out of curiosity, I started browsing around the Chrono Wikia/Chronopedia, and noticed that it seemed like I'd read a lot of the stuff before. For example:

Quote from: Chrono Wikia
Kid (キッド, Kiddo) is a swashbuckling, gritty thief with a penchant for radical action...

Quote from: Chrono Compendium
Kid, the swashbuckling, gritty thief with a penchant for radical action...

And...

Quote from: Chrono Wikia
Kid was born in 1004 A.D., when Schala, bound to the Time Devourer, feared her mind would become increasingly consumed by hatred and created a clone of herself. She gave the baby her Pendant and sent her to the modern world; there, she was found by Lucca and subsequently adopted.

Quote from: Chrono Compendium
Kid was born in 1004 A.D., when Schala, bound to the Time Devourer, feared her mind would become increasingly consumed by hatred and created a clone of herself. She gave the baby her Pendant and sent her to the modern world; there, she was found by Lucca and subsequently adopted.

How about one more for good measure?

Quote from: Chrono Wikia
Serge's existence is a contradiction between the dimensions the basis for much of the philosophical discourse in Chrono Cross. Born to Marge and Wazuki of the fishing village of Arni in the El Nido Archipelago, Serge had a storied history with the world since before he knew how to write. At the tender age of three years old, he came into contact with the Frozen Flame as a result of his father Wazuki's desperation to heal his son after he had been mauled by a panther demon. The contact healed him and designated him as its Arbiter, or controller; this caused the Frozen Flame to be unusable by the supercomputer FATE due to the Prometheus Circuit. Due to its obviously advanced technology, it had no problem binding both Miguel, a friend of Serge's father, and eventually Wazuki himself into cruel servitude. For the time being, however, Serge escaped unharmed with Wazuki, who was only mildly corrupted by the computer. Back in Arni, Serge became good friends with Leena, Miguel's daughter, and the other inhabitants of the village, who took interest in watching him grow. Forces beyond his control would soon threaten his life again, however.

Quote from: Chrono Compendium
Serge's existence is a contradiction between the dimensions the basis for much of the philosophical discourse in Chrono Cross. Born to Marge and Wazuki of the fishing village of Arni in the El Nido Archipelago, Serge had a storied history with the world since before he knew how to write. At the tender age of three years old, he came into contact with the Frozen Flame as a result of his father Wazuki's desperation to heal his son after he had been mauled by a panther demon. The contact healed him and designated him as its Arbiter, or controller; this caused the Frozen Flame to be unusable by the supercomputer FATE due to the Prometheus Circuit. Due to its obviously advanced technology, it had no problem binding both Miguel, a friend of Serge's father, and eventually Wazuki himself into cruel servitude. For the time being, however, Serge escaped unharmed with Wazuki, who was only mildly corrupted by the computer. Back in Arni, Serge became good friends with Leena, Miguel's daughter, and the other inhabitants of the village, who took interest in watching him grow. Forces beyond his control would soon threaten his life again, however.

Huh.

So, isn't this blatant plagiarism? This is just one example. Much of the Chronopedia site appears to have cannibalized the Compendium's encyclopedia. It makes me angry, knowing how hard people here worked to write these articles, and then to see them stolen like this. I watched so many of these articles evolve over the years. People worked their tails off on this stuff. And the Chronopedia/Chrono Wikia doesn't even give a shred of credit, aside from a link in a "Links and Affiliates" section.

Wikia's Terms of Use say, "You may not submit content to the Service that you did not create or that you not have permission to submit." And they have contact information for copyright infringement on their Terms of Use page. Unless ZeaLitY or someone else high up created the Chrono Wikia, I don't see how they can get away with this. If they want to go through the trouble of making a Chrono Wiki, they need to come up with their own content, and not steal the Compendium's.

FaustWolf

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #1 on: June 23, 2011, 05:05:28 pm »
Whoa, thanks for pointing this out RW! I guess we'll have to let ZeaLitY comment on this and go from there.

Sajainta

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #2 on: June 23, 2011, 05:07:22 pm »
That's absolutely shameless.  I hope that--if they are plagiarizing--there will be serious consequences.  I've been plagiarized.  It's absolutely awful to see someone take something you've worked on and are proud of and pass it off as their own creation.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2011, 05:09:35 pm by Sajainta »

ZeaLitY

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #3 on: June 23, 2011, 05:49:23 pm »
It's probably a grey area we couldn't actually defend. While I think we removed the GNU license thing for adding to the Compendium encyclopedia, a lot of this might still fall under "derivative works" or something, and even if we tried to use an official channel, we'd be painting a giant target on the Compendium for all our other copyright infringements.

It's a matter of poor class on their part, I guess. Obviously, to build the Compendium we had to appropriate something now and then. For example, Chronoshock translated an Ultimania interview of Yasunori Mitsuda. I saved a backup copy, and as soon as ChronoShock went down for good, I placed it on the Compendium.

I guess it's not worth getting worked up over, anyhow. Wikias have to follow certain rules on content and don't get their own forums. Something like our awesome music pages with remix and doujin listings would never fly over there. They're never going to approach what the Compendium has. This site is really special for that reason; we are virtually the last great classic-style fan site to come about before Wikias took things over.

utunnels

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #4 on: June 24, 2011, 03:25:56 am »
Well whoever did that, he was just too lazy.
Come on, at least change the phrase so everyone thinks you are the real author.
XD

rushingwind

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #5 on: June 24, 2011, 06:10:11 am »
I had blinding rage when I first came across this. Plagiarism is so not cool in my book. And I know they can't be as awesome as the Compendium is, but... still... It makes me really angry to see it.

OverlordMikey

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #6 on: June 24, 2011, 06:39:24 am »
I'm not really feeling "rage" per-say but this does seem to be unquestionable laziness.

At the very least the person/people in question could have provided the Compendium as a source. He/She should know better than to just rudely take stuff from people and claim it as their own...  :(

That or they in fact didn't copy it and this is just the oddest case of being on the same wavelength ever...  :D

Bard_of_Time

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #7 on: June 24, 2011, 09:59:54 am »
I hate plagiarism. Just because you're not in school anymore doesn't mean it's not a problem.

I dunno if I told this story or not, but my bro wrote a pretty epic essay. A bunch of kids were like 'This is an epic essay! Let's turn it in to the exact same teacher.' The teacher he originally handed it into. The teacher who keeps a pinned copy of the thing at his desk.

My feeling is that we just chalk it up to idiots. Inconsiderate idiots who can't even say 'Oh by the way this was copied straight from the Compendium. Go there. kthxbai'

Lord J Esq

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #8 on: June 24, 2011, 12:42:34 pm »
We could send them an overly righteous Cease & Desist "order" demanding that they remove all offending and non-offending material and vow never to edit a wiki again, giving them but 48 of their Earth hours to comply with our unconditional imperatives before resolving to refer the matter to the Compendium Tribunal and Law Enforcement Department who may at its sole discretion litigate the perpetrator's total and absolute judicial extirpation from the Internet.

Manly Man

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #9 on: June 24, 2011, 01:10:00 pm »
Wow. You would be wonderful at writing political speeches.

Lord J Esq

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #10 on: June 24, 2011, 01:31:09 pm »
Hah! There aren't many candidates worthy of delivering my speeches.

Schala Zeal

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #11 on: August 24, 2011, 10:53:45 pm »
Does the Compendium even have the right to file suit, since both parties are describing material belonging to Square?

ZeaLitY

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Re: Compendium's Encyclopedia Plagiarized?
« Reply #12 on: August 25, 2011, 12:00:03 am »
No. That's why the best course of action is to be dismissive. How much it reflects on our glory that we're mimicked!