Collecting Specialness

March 6, 2009 10:24 AM

I noticed Neatorama had another post from Metafilter on their site (previously), but then looked closely and noticed it wasn't Metafilter they were linking to.

All of the collections featured seem to have a corresponding entry to a comment in the Metafilter post or the original Smithsonian article. Okay, so maybe there really are only so many special collections to feature, and it doesn't appear to be lifting the comment text, but it does seem to be letting someone else do the work. The site is also awfully suspicious in that this is the only thing on it. No this isn't illegal and maybe only borderline unethical, but it is annoying. Could it be that User Friendly is branching out into diploma milling?

posted by Toekneesan to MetaFilter-related at 10:24 AM (34 comments total)

ha. That's totally lifted, but they did do the work to at least grab a few random images.
posted by GuyZero at 10:34 AM on March 6

Not really the issue at stake here, but MAN has the quality of that site gone down the crapper since they introduced the "Upcoming Queue."
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:34 AM on March 6

You can't own links.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:36 AM on March 6

toekneesan, could you pls give attribution to the artist you borrowed your profile pic from?
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:38 AM on March 6

(What Neatorama's doing there? That's what MetaFilter does all the fucking time.)
posted by Sys Rq at 10:42 AM on March 6

...well, since you asked,
From the Milwaukee Art Museum's description of the poster they sell of the painting: "the brilliant but foreboding Stanczyk, The King's Jester, 1862 by Jan Matejko (National Museum of Poland, Warsaw, Poland). The painting is meant to show the joyless Stanczyk, a court jester in Poland who became known as a national symbol of patriotism, who sits alone with the newspaper telling of the fate of his war torn country while a joyful ball takes place in the background."
posted by Toekneesan at 10:43 AM on March 6

Toekneesan: "No this isn't illegal and maybe only borderline unethical, but it is annoying."

Those are our websites. We saw them first.
posted by Plutor at 10:47 AM on March 6 [3 favorites]

There's been a lot of crossover recently, going both ways.
posted by mudpuppie at 10:54 AM on March 6

Hypertext links? Propagating around the INTERNET?!
posted by DU at 10:59 AM on March 6 [6 favorites]

(that was sarcasm in case you couldn't tell)
posted by DU at 10:59 AM on March 6

Could it be that User Friendly is branching out into diploma milling?

Where do you get "diploma milling" from? The site links to the University of Notre Dame, for example. I happen to work at one of the listed universities (not that one) and am familiar with most of the rest. Your assessment is unfounded.
posted by desjardins at 11:02 AM on March 6

The site that seems to have used the comments is www.onlinecourses.org, which is why I wondered about diploma milling. What does that domain do other than create a single blog post seemingly lifted from our comments and the Smithsonian. I suspect once it get's a high enough Google rank it will start selling fake diplomas.
posted by Toekneesan at 11:06 AM on March 6

Well, that's really none of our business what they do with their own site, is it? If you really care so much, contact the owner and ask.

Full disclosure: I have linked to sites I found on Mefi on my Twitter feed and Facebook page without linking back to Mefi. I must be lynched.
posted by desjardins at 11:12 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

I see they hired Illiad.
posted by klangklangston at 11:14 AM on March 6

Maybe we could get them to bribe us.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:17 AM on March 6

I'm not calling for a lynching, and I understand that a link doesn't need a footnote, but every now and then this community creates something really special, like the best books from your field AskMe, or this Special Collections post where the community's comments were just as amazing as the post. As a member of this community, I get annoyed when I see those serendipitous creations of this rather awesome community being exploited for rather questionable means. Maybe I'm being too sensitive, and of course it really doesn't matter what I think, but I thought we ought to at least be aware that it was there and hopefully have a fruitful discussion about it. I don't think there's much if anything to be done about it. Perhaps I was wrong when I thought it would be useful to be aware of it.
posted by Toekneesan at 11:39 AM on March 6

The new Mefi link attribution policy: "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck."

Either that, or we just quote the whole of the 1913 British Drop Table. For computing the additional length of rope to generate the classic hangman's fracture.
posted by adipocere at 11:41 AM on March 6

MetaFilter: Perhaps I was wrong when I thought
posted by netbros at 11:44 AM on March 6

This is what the Internet does.
posted by ODiV at 12:13 PM on March 6

You're being too sensitive.
posted by carsonb at 12:17 PM on March 6

It's ok. I steal links from other places for MetaFilter all the time.
posted by loquacious at 12:45 PM on March 6

That's funny - I took loquacious' Robots Fucking Dinosaurs link to some friends running a robot-fixated blog. Linking us there, or them here, feels oddly spammish.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:03 PM on March 6

That was dinosaurs fucking robots, as opposed to robots fucking dinosaurs or fucking dinosaur robots or robot dinosaur fucking.
posted by loquacious at 1:19 PM on March 6

It looks pretty damned lame, but in a kind of pathetic way that makes it hard for me to care too much. Someone could drop neatorama a line to followup, I guess, but I'm not sure there's much to do here otherwise besides just shake our collective head and say "crappy webperson is crappy".
posted by cortex at 1:37 PM on March 6

Isn't it kind of short sighted and dismissive to assume that the poster is a person and then call them crappy to boot? Cortex, you might have just insulted the first Artificial Intelligence, recently come alive and determined do its best to learn more about its creators by feeding one population what might be interesting tidbits that have already seen and judged by another population, and watching the reaction. I mean the poster's name is Quebot.

This kind of snap judgment is racist humanist carbonist creationist biologist. Yeah, I'm gonna go with biologist, that won't cause problems.
posted by Science! at 1:55 PM on March 6

Just digging around, it looks like this individual (or group, who can tell) has something of a business building traffic via blog posting and spamming/self-promoting, something tells my highly developed senses the pattern here is not random...

It's not a diploma mill thing, it's a link farming thing (the main page for the site is not empty, Toekneesan, it's a resource of online education provider links). The reason there's only one entry looks to be because the blog on that site is just getting underway.

To his/her/their credit, it looks like the copy is all original and this is not automated stuff, there looks to be a fair amount of work involved. There is a lot worse stealing of metafilter content to feed a lot worse link farms out there.
posted by nanojath at 2:00 PM on March 6

There is no god but the Archie Joke-Generate Laugh Unit 3000, sir.
posted by cortex at 2:00 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]

Yeah, adding a "via" is a non-essential courtesy when you're talking about a single link or two - but an entire collection moves it into a territory where you're appropriating proper work that's been done for you and claiming it as your own. (I say this as someone who's spent no little time trying to work out what the standard freelancer's rate should be for "link research", a category of work that nobody seems to recognise yet.)

So yep, it's really weak on their part, and would probably fall under the general category of 'plagiarism'. But they're just some assholes on the internet, ultimately, and while it might tweak our sense of moral outrage a little, it's ultimately a situation where nobody's really lost much and there's no terribly satisfying solution to be had. Hey ho.
posted by flashboy at 2:09 PM on March 6

As the OP, I have to say there's definitely a whiff of skeeviness here (at Online Courses, not Neatorama, to be clear), but I am sure oh, say, a few extra favorites for my post would clear up any lingering feelings of dismay.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:26 PM on March 6

There is no god but the Archie Joke-Generate Laugh Unit 3000, sir.

God is dead, apparently.
posted by Sys Rq at 2:31 PM on March 6

Hmmm. That home page of OnlineCourses was blank or maybe down when I first posted. Just the template displayed. Now that it has content, I'm still not sure I get it. Why would you submit to Neatorama before you built the site?
posted by Toekneesan at 7:44 PM on March 6

SpiffyRob: "Not really the issue at stake here, but MAN has the quality of that site gone down the crapper since they introduced the "Upcoming Queue.""

I agree; you do know they offer a feed with no posts from the Upcoming Queue right? Here's the post with the address of said feed.
posted by IndigoRain at 10:28 PM on March 6

Gawker Media does this constantly. It's either a day or two a post hits Metafilter and Gawker blogs use it without ever mentioning Metafilter. I've noticed it on Gawker.com and Jezebel.
posted by anniecat at 12:29 PM on March 8

I agree; you do know they offer a feed with no posts from the Upcoming Queue right?

I do now! Many thanks.
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:53 AM on March 9