As a tech site which aims to share knowledge and experience, content is its core value. To attract readers, it needs to produce valuable content and keep the originality of the content. When an article is published on a site, it should be a copyrighted property of that site or the original author while others should be very careful when considering to copy that article to their own site. They should generally avoid to copying the whole content of the article.
However, in reality, this is not the case. There are many cases where people would just copy the whole content and append a statement about the source of the article. This operation may be authorized by the original author/site or it's a public domain content. Nevertheless, the same content would appear in many different websites. This situation is frequently seen in Chinese websites.
Let's take a look at an example about how an English article 12 Extremely Useful Hacks for JavaScript would be translated into Chinese and then appears in various Chinese websites. The journey starts at Weibo - The Chinese version of Twitter.
On Weibo, there is a weibo published by a famous tech site official account @SegmentFault.
This weibo is promoting the Chinese version of the above English article. After opening the link, below content can be seen at the bottom of the article. It states the source of the article.
Now click the source link, the same article content is appearing on another site. And it also contains a source link below the title of the article.
The new source link would point to a new site which contains the exact same content. And at the bottom of the article, it claims the article is translated from the English article.
The original source of the article is found only after navigating through three sites. Just like navigating stacktrace to find a bug. What would be more scary is that some other small sites who want to survive would just copy the contents from these big sites so the chain would be quite long at the end. The end result is people would see the same duplicated content all around the web.
This is not the only case this has been seen, there are lots more. This behavior is definitely not advocated. It has too many drawbacks.
- It would violate copyright of the original author and causes trouble to the author
- It wastes readers' time since they would see the same content over and over again
- It affects the integrity of the content since the original author would update the origin content along the time but all other sources would not synchronize the original content
A tech website should not survive using this way. Hope these websites can focus more on creating original content which people can benefit from.
