[Foundation-l] Finding copyright violations with CopyScape tool

Sun Aug 24 08:59:55 UTC 2008

I'm currently experimenting with a Javascript gadget that enables live copyvio searches at the Norwegian Wikipedia. The searches uses Yahoo! as the search engine. For the moment a few additional features are lacking, like copyvio searches in old contributions to articles.

If the tool should be popular Yahoo! should probably be contacted as the load generated could be pretty huge. I haven't tried to gather any usage statistics but I guess a couple of searches are generated per 100 contributions or something similar. A gross guess at no.wp we generate somewhere between 100 and 1000 such searches each day.

Unfortunately the documentation is only available in Norwegian.

John

>(NOTE:  I have absolutely 0 relation to anyone at CopyScape or have
>any interest in the financial situation of the company)
>
>Hey everyone,
>
>Well a few years ago I used to use [[Copyscape]] at
>http://www.copyscape.com/ to help me find copyright violations on new
>Wikipedia pages.  Basically, you input a URL and it scans the internet
>for other copies of all or parts of that text. It's a pretty awesome
>tool - try it out (try somewhere other than Wikipedia, explained
>below).
>
>It is a paid tool; it costs $0.05 per search.  However, they had
>Wikipedia whitelisted to be free of charge.  However, I recently tried
>to use it again and it turns out that they no longer whitelist
>Wikipedia addresses.  Basically, it had become so popular with
>Wikipedia patrollers that they were getting bogged down.
>
>I emailed the people in charge of the site and this is what they had to say:
>"We're huge fans of Wikipedia and would love to whitelist it. In fact, we
>were doing this for a while, but we had to stop due to constraints we
>have on the supply-side, and the large amount of Wikipedia use."
>
>Now, barring me paying for my own searches, is there any way that the
>Wikimedia Foundation might step in for funding, either at cost
>(probably insanely cheap) or with a blanket plan to whitelist
>Wikipedia again?  I personally feel this would be an incredibly
>valuable tool.
>
>In addition to the benefit I think we would gain they would have the
>great distinction of being a product used by one of the top 10
>websites on the Internet (which could be a bargaining chip).
>
>Thanks for any comments!
>[[User:mboverload]] @ Wikipedia-EN
>
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