Until recently, I was working on a comprehensive directory of the etymology of hundreds of (682, to be precise) names given to warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Silly me, I had even toyed with the idea of making that content accessible on a corner of my website.
I have suspended all efforts to create that content, for a good reason.
Several times I had an article on my old website discussing the conventions used in naming of IJN ships.
I recently discovered (for the nth time, actually, where n is an angering integer) that significant portions of that article have been included verbatim and put into a Wikipedia page discussing IJN ship naming conventions, written by an anonymous author, of course, and without any credit given to the original content or to me as the author of a significant part of the article. To set the record straight, I had restored that article to a corner of my website that houses such non-business content as demonstration of what was stolen, but have now even removed that, as it would likely just bring more theft, including clueless claims that it was “public domain” because it was public.
We live in a world in which criminals get away with crime because they have been given anonymity by the tech bros claiming to create a wonderful world by connecting people. I say lock the criminal tech bros up and take back intellectual property rights they have made super-easy to violate.
The Internet is awash with stolen and criminal content. Billionaires claiming to have a mission to connect people partner with outright criminals, including, for example, Chinese criminals on Facebook using what appear to be AI-generated photos of whores, who might turn out to be thugs in Kosovo. Such garbage has become the norm.
But not to worry. If you install an ad blocker, you can pretend it’s not happening. But it’s still happening.
Returning to the plagiarism, it could be that many people don’t realize that stealing and republishing content with no credit given is a crime. Why? Because you can get away with it, so it must not be a crime, right? Anonymity is the friend of criminals.
I have asked on an IJN-related Facebook group if anyone knows who created or manages the offending Wikipedia page, but I don’t have much hope of getting a useful answer. Information wants to be stolen, right?
Several days have passed with no information forthcoming. I suspect there will be no information provided by anyone. And in the group I asked, there is virutally no original content, most members concentrating on scanning and uploading photos from published books. Such is the nature of much of social media.