I was going through the Wikipedia article on the Babbar Khalsa member Jagtar Singh Hawara, and found that he has been described as a "freedom fighter" in the intro. A page on the Network 18 website in.com was cited as the reference for the term "freedom figher": http://connect.in.com/jagtar-singh-hawara/biography-128389.html
I found it surprising that Network 18 described the alleged assassin of Beant Singh as a "freedom fighter". On closer scrutiny, I realized that the in.com page is just a mirror of the Wikipedia article's intro section. This is obvious from the content and the presence of unlinked reference numbers (such as "[1][2]") in the text. If you view the page source, you'll find a meta tag: <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Web18 Wiki">. It seems that Web 18 (the Internet and Mobile arm of Network 18) has been scraping content from the introduction sections of several Wikipedia articles on a regular basis and publishing it on in.com without proper attribution (which is required by CC-BY-SA). This can be confirmed by visiting other pages on the website and clicking on the "Bio" links on these pages. A few examples: http://connect.in.com/kuldip-singh-brar/biography-167025.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuldip_Singh_Brar http://connect.in.com/environment/biography-517121.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_environment http://connect.in.com/taliban/biography-522879.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban There's another, deeper problem here (which has been discussed many times before): reputed media sources use content from Wikpedia without attribution, and these sources are then used as references in the Wikipedia articles to support false claims. Back in 2009, an IP user (presumably a supporter of the Khalistan movement) had edited the article to replace the word "Militant" with "freedom fighter": http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jagtar_Singh_Hawara&diff=277698712&oldid=277433764 Then in.come must have simply copied this content without attribution, and in 2010, another IP address used in.com as a reference to support the assertion that Hawara was a "freedom fighter": http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jagtar_Singh_Hawara&diff=next&oldid=334812460 -- Utkarshraj Atmaram http://ut7.in/blog/ _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l