Nonsense.
Wikipedia as an entity does not scrape content. When information from another source is used it should be correctly referenced, and more often than not most Wikipedia pages are of good quality and contain the correct references for all the information contained.
If you’re going to say such things then please provide some proof of your claims.
I disagree. Wikipedia is all manually edited. Sure, there may be some contributors who simply copy and paste content in there, but IMX they’re very much a minority.
What is incredibly common is for other websites to scrape content off Wikipedia, reformat it and present it as their own. This may or may not be legal in each case, I haven’t checked the terms of the licence or the attributions on each one, but it is (a) misleading to the surfer, who thinks he’s getting something from that site, not from Wikipedia, and (b) unhelpful and unnecessary, like almost all scraped content it adds no value whatsoever to the internet.
Having a reference does not make the article correct. More often then not the reference is in itself of bias. Just one bad reference taints an entire article. In the end, Ive got better things to do then get into a debate about wikiscrapper. There are people who support it, good luck to them, thats their right. But their are others who have a good laugh at the silly junk articles. At my University, wikipedia articles often make the round of Lecturers for a good laugh during morning coffee.
I do not believe Wikipedia has any special status, the only thing that Google is giving special status to are their own websites such as youtube.
I suggest giving it a try, take one of your websites, add a whole pile of references at the bottom of each page and make the layout similar to wikipedia and see what happens. That is the only way you will know. Its working for me is all I can say. The only only problem for me was my content was original, so in effect I had to invent a series of references that actually do not exist. Its a sad situation indeed. But google have got their serps in such a mess since Panda its all you can do. Best of luck.
For the vast majority of factual pages it does. This is a blanket statement that holds no relevance.
You’ve yet to provide any proof of your claims. To state “more often than not” would claim that you’ve read most of the articles on Wikipedia, which leads me to disregard your comment on the subject.
There is no debate. There is your opinion, and a call for evidence on said opinion. You’re on a SEO board, so if you have no interest in backing up your opinion it’s safe to say that people will regard it as incorrect. The simple fact that you’ve stated that your SEO strategy is to scrape content because, as you’ve incorrectly stated “Wikipedia do it” only further damages your viewpoint.
You’ll be surprised to know that a lot of academics contribute to Wikipedia. It’s a great source of information for the layman, and more often than not their articles are free of bias and show facts. It may also interest you to know that Wikipedia is largely supported by a number of colleges and universities as “a good point to start” when researching. Even in top 25 universities (worldwide) Wikipedia is often a cited source in lectures. I should know, I’ve attended one.
Of course, at a university lecturers will laugh at it, because there are a small subset of students that don’t want to do work and will steal stuff from Wikipedia. This does not mean that Wikipedia is a poor source of information. For people looking to learn it is probably the first and best resource available on the Internet.
These two areas generate a lot of revenue so the people SEOing these sites will try so many different tactics - more than likely black hat, so for Google to get there results 99.9% perfect is going to be a long task and in my opinion we haven’t seen the last of the Panda