The GTA Wiki is accusing wiki company Fandom of plagiarism. This comes after the GTA Wiki moved away from Fandom earlier this year which we reported on here.
For those unaware, the GTA Wiki is the most important resource for GTA fans and has been for over 20 years. After a long battle with censorship, intrusive ads and more, the team behind the GTA Wiki quit the Fandom-based site to launch their own Wiki which is free from the corporate shackles. The hope is GTA fans stop using the old, worse and ill-maintained and only use the new site, gta.wiki, from now on.
Following the launch of the GTA Online Kortz Center Heist update, staff from the GTA Wiki website noticed the old wiki ran by Fandom has seemingly used their work and left it largely unchanged.
“Fandom’s paid staff have been blatantly plagiarizing new articles from GTA Wiki. When we removed the infringing content, Fandom banned our admins and claimed the similarities were just a coincidence.”
GTA Wiki
According to one of the staff members, Monkeypolice188, Fandom has hired people that have frequently taken the new Wiki’s pages and changed just a handful of words. A post was made to the wiki to explain the situation. An example comparison can be found below:
To further back up these claims, the GTA Wiki team spotted the Fandom site including a typo from an article. The Merula was listed to have a top speed of 1870 kmph which is obviously a mistake. Fandom used that number and did not both to correct it. The real number is 170 kmph.
The GTA Wiki staff even have editing session logs for Fandom workers across multiple articles on their site. With minutes, articles on the same GTA Online content popped up on the Fandom-run wiki with slight changes. This violates GTA Wiki’s content license which requires usage to credit the original source. To make matters worse, GTA Wiki staff have been banned from using the old Fandom site after attempting to remove the blatantly stolen material.
UPDATE: 21st July – 11:06am
Fandom responded to our story with the following statement:
“Fandom has investigated recent claims regarding content on the Grand Theft Auto community. Trust is the foundation of Fandom’s communities, and we expect contributors to uphold the highest standards of integrity. While our initial review of the information provided did not identify evidence of plagiarism, a second review prompted by new information determined that a contributor had violated our community standards for original content. We have terminated our relationship with the contributor responsible and are reverting all flagged edits that do not meet our standards.”
A Fandom Spokesperson
As we’ve said before, please only use gta.wiki and not the Fandom-based site anymore. The new version is far better and is the most up to date way to get every possible detail on the GTA series. This is a especially important ahead of GTA 6’s release. Back independent media ran by fans and not a corporate/non-fan run site.
For more Grand Theft Auto news updates, stay tuned to RockstarINTEL.
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