Content & Writing Tycoon

**sasquatch** · 07-23-2006, 11:26 PM

I was listening to a shoemoney report and he mentioned he scraps wiki but give them credit and that is ok as long as you give them credit for it.

Can anyone elaborate on this?
First how do you scrap it (by hand would be very slow)

And is it really ok to use this for your content?

Thanks for any advice

**Plugin-Developer** · 07-25-2006, 09:25 PM

To scrape a page, I'm assuming you could get some software, and set it to find the stuff you want. Here's an article on scraping

Wikipedia is not copyrighted. It is copylefted. You can learn more about that on this page.

I'm not sure where to find the software, but I'm sure there's some on hotscripts.com or something like that. Scraping would be a way to get a lot of good information really quickly (generally) but people are more likely to hang around and read what you have if your content is original.

Of course, if you want to just make the $$, sometimes you don't care about that.

**Atomm** · 07-27-2006, 11:54 AM

Sasquatch,

I heard that episode as well. I am not sure if he means automated or manually retrieving text from Wikipedia.

His comment about Wikipedia gave me an idea on something I have been trying to decide how to do. I have a directory and I wanted descriptions for all the categories. I went to wikipedia and found brief excerpts for the descriptions. I also put a link back to the whole page, thus meeting the requirement of citing Wikipedia as the source according to their CopyLeft License.

In a pinch, I see this as a good way to fill in some holes. I am even considering using it as a basis for writting my own content.

**DronDron** · 07-31-2006, 10:59 AM

Wikipedia LEGALLY lets you use their content, as long as you credit them. Don't scrape wiki automatically. Most wiki pages are crap. Pick a niche (i.e. great women or crazy scientists or assassinated presidents) and hand pick articles. Wiki as some awesome articles sometimes.

**Ganceann** · 08-06-2006, 03:11 AM

There is always the issue of scraped content becoming duplicate content and sufferin a duplicate content penalty.

Normally from what I have observed is scraped content gives a short term boost but nothing long term when identified as not giving any original content (can take a few weeks)