Camera-wiki.org:Camerapedia

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Camerapedia.org (Camerapedia) was founded in 2004 by User:Lbstone. This strictly noncommercial, Mediawiki-based site provided for the creation of a serious independent resource about cameras and their lenses and accessories. It contained text, and the photographs and other illustrations within the articles were linked from other websites, with the permission of those websites and the copyright holders. User:Rebollo_fr became the most prolific author, giving the encyclopedia a strong coverage of vintage Japanese cameras and their makers. In 2006 the Flickr group Camerapedia was founded as a high-capacity, high-bandwidth illustration resource for the wiki. Camerapedia.org's webserver was financed by Lbstone, the owner of the domain name; the image resource space was provided by the Flickr community.

Domain-name squatting of camerapedia.com had predated the formation of the genuine Camerapedia by years.[1] Long no more than a blank page, this was first exploited (for an anonymous advertising page) by December 2007,[2] and one year later into something that looked at first glance like an encyclopedia.[3] The encyclopedic first impression was achieved by plagiarizing Wikipedia.[4] Then as now (2011), camerapedia.com was the product of "Information Superbrand, Inc.", a small company based in Irvine, California[5] that has created a large number of worthless websites with "pedia" in their domain names.[6]

In January 2011 Lbstone had already negotiated the sale of the domain name www.camerapedia.org to Wikia but had not announced this at Camerapedia or, as far as is known, even privately informed any contributor. When Lbstone did reveal it, various contributors could not be convinced of the benefits to a long-running independent non-commercial project of hosting by Wikia, despite the influx of experienced Wikia staff. Wikia made the individual page addresses of www.camerapedia.org plain redirects to the corresponding pages of camerapedia.wikia.com.[7] Two months later, after incidents of wrong user attribution of wiki texts and unauthorized image uploads - both reverted by Wikia after protests, advertisement mode was switched on. Camerapedia is a commercial site now, on thin ice since it started commercial mode without having a valid permission for most of its Flickr image links.

The project community found a response to the unwelcomed takeover. They "forked" Camerapedia in the night of January 23rd 2011. User:Voxphoto created a new Flickr group[8] (whose name changed a couple of times), and flickrmailed invitations to anyone who seemed likely to take some kind of action. User:Steevithak had done some hard thinking about what steps would be involved, and in the course of a discussion[9] in the new group he proposed a plan of action[10] that eventually was followed very closely. User:Heritagefutures and others encouraged Voxphoto and Steevithak to make these efforts to launch Camera-wiki.org as a new home for the old wiki community. Almost the whole community of Camerapedia contributors moved to the Camera-wiki.org project.

Camerapedia has found some new users since who prefer using own images which they loaded up to the Wikia server. It lacks a good admin who's engaged in keeping its community on track, and its "Wikia skin" truly spoils many of the old original page designs.

Notes

  1. See this February 2001 grab by Wayback.
  2. See this December 2007 grab by Wayback.
  3. See this December 2008 grab by Wayback.
  4. See for example how the text about "Twin-Lens Reflex Camera" on the top page is taken directly and unthinkingly from the (rather good) 28 September 2008 version of "Twin-lens reflex camera" at Wikipedia. Camerapedia.com tells its readers: "Mamiya's C-Series, introduced in the 1960s, the C-3, C-2, C-33, C-22 and the Mamiya C330 and Mamiya C220 along with their predecessor the Mamiyaflex,[1] are the only conventional TLR cameras to feature truly interchangeable lenses.[2]" The change to "1960s" from simple "60s" had been the latest one made (on 28 September) to the Wikipedia article. "[1]" and "[2]" are the result of pasting text containing footnote indices from the screen. Here is the version of Wikipedia's "Copyrights" page that was current at the time. This conspicuously points readers to the section "Reusers' rights and obligations", which starts: If you want to use Wikipedia materials in your own books/articles/websites or other publications, you can do so -- but only in compliance with the GFDL. (It continues, providing detail.) Yet the camerapedia.com page of December 2008 contains no mention of either "GFDL" or "GNU" and clearly violates the GFDL; worse, the foot of the page states "Copyright © 1995-2008 by Information Superbrand, Inc. All rights reserved." By April 2011, the only noticeable change was that "© 1995-2008" had been updated to "© 1995-2011". (See the current top page of camerapedia.com, or the copy of it made in April 2011 and archived here at BackupURL.)
  5. Company profile for "Information Superbrand", Manta. Accessed 4 April 2011.
  6. Stan Schroeder, "Ruining ****Pedias For Fun and Profit", Mashable, 18 February 2008. Accessed 4 April 2011.
  7. For example, www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Fujica_G690 was the address within www.camerapedia.org of the page about the Fujica G690 and closely related cameras; since January 24th 2011 this has been a redirect to the derivative article within camerapedia.wikia.com on the same subject.
  8. Camerawiki Flickr group, at Flickr.
  9. Discussion about forking Camerapedia, at Flickr.
  10. Steevithak's proposal, at Flickr.

See also