Thread: Using Wikipedia Content

A new trend I've noticed recently is for very large sites to incorporate wikipedia in their own results eg
bing: http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Zeus
and orange: Zeus - Encyclopédie par wikipédia - Orange
rather than link out to wikipedia
orange is interesting because they have also incorporated ads in the text

do you think this serves a useful function for content creation? if not why would these companies be doing it?

also do you think they have downloaded the whole of wikipedia or do it page by page 'on-the-fly" somehow with cURL etc?

Originally Posted by DickTracy

A new trend I've noticed recently is for very large sites to incorporate wikipedia in their own results...

OpenFacts maintains a list of Copies of Wikipedia Content

Originally Posted by DickTracy

do you think this serves a useful function for content creation? if not why would these companies be doing it?

It seems to work well if you:

• Have a good amount of domain authority
• Enrich each page with additional content so that you can rank for something unique

Originally Posted by DickTracy

also do you think they have downloaded the whole of wikipedia or do it page by page 'on-the-fly" somehow with cURL etc?

They download a compressed archive of Wikipedia from Wikimedia Downloads.

Personally I wouldnt do it unless I felt that it would give some benefit to visitors to the site. My preference is to link out to wikipedia, I have thing about keeping my sites content as unique as possible.

You will eventually get hit by the duplicate content filters if you use Wikipedia content verbatim. I don't think Bing is very concerned about that, but most sites will never develop an authority level greater than Wikipedia.

I suggest that you either completely re-write the content, or as Will suggests, add additional content. If you are going to add content, try to add more content than that which you copy from Wikipedia. You might still get caught by the filters when you do this.

I frequently use Wikipedia for research, but I never copy their content. As an SEO professional with 13 years of experience, I have seen way too many sites that have been wacked by G for using duplicate content, which makes me a bit paranoid about it.

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

They download a compressed archive of Wikipedia from Wikimedia Downloads.

Wow! That has to be one heck of a large file.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

Wow! That has to be one heck of a large file.

http://download.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html

So yes, somehow HUGE!

As others have said I think most people would get hit by the duplicate content filters. My personal preference is to link out to wikipedia, I think it gives a better user experience. There are certainly quite a few sites now that scrape wikipedia for content.

As for rewriting wikipedia content, I think its better if you can write something yourself from scratch, trying to rework a wikipedia article tends to end up with something very similar to the original.

Wikipedia and wiki answers can easily rank in google for your company name, having your wikipage on the first page of search engines can easily attract customers. Like for example, in the first page of search engine you have your geo or google map, your domain site and wiki on the first page of search engine will enable you to to acquire mo traffic.

If you display the appropriate Creative Commons attribution, then I don't see why G would whack your site. It should simply be a case of the page not ranking well if it is too similar to the original content.

If you are not breaking the law, it should be OK.

Same for Yahoo answers. They insist that you display "Powered by Yahoo! Answers" on your page, so if you leave this out, then you could expect your site to be flagged/reported as a spam site.

If you are using plugins to feed content to your sites, I would check these things out.

There is a lot that has made the news in terms of Wikipedia content. There are factual errors that many have reported, however, as I understand they have an airtight process and before anything goes online it thoroughly checked.

However, a recent American study has revealed that there still are many cases of content errors in Wikipedia and that it should not always be considered as the most reliable content site

would i still get hit by duplicate content filters even when i just copied [one or two paragraph] portion of a page in wiki and link it to the original?