
Seeding a startup without using fake accounts: anyone seed a startup with wikipedia content?  How did that work out? - amichail

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yaacovtp
As long as the content you're seeding your site with is valuable to your users
go ahead and get whatever you can. We got a ton of great content for a
gardening application from usda.gov and are able to manipulate it in ways that
makes it useful to our users.

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amichail
I'm not sure how useful this is.

But it would give users some idea as to what the site would look like with
more contributions from users.

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amichail
Someone recommended that I seed <http://studystickies.com> with wikipedia
content.

So I've been working on that and plan to make an update next week with some
wikipedia content.

At least in this way, search queries would yield something interesting.

But at the same time, it would be clear that this data was imported from
wikipedia. So it's not obvious what sort of impression this would have on
visitors to the site.

Also, it's not clear whether wikipedians would be attracted to the site since
this is not really a tool for wikipedia .

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louisadekoya
Your site appears to be down right now but I stumbled upon it once before and
not only did I grok it straight away, I also thought it was a great idea. That
said, if some people are saying they don't get it, you should do something
about that.

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amichail
The site is up now and includes wikipedia content.

For example, try this query:

<http://studystickies.com/#number%20theory>

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especkman
Is the GNU Documentation License that Wikipedia is published under viral in
the the same manner as the GPL?

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picnichouse
I'm curious what technology you used to grab content from wikipedia?

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andre
it's pretty easy to write a scraper in most languages and customize it as
needed. I've done in PHP.

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spoonyg
Easy, but really if a site is nice enough to provide a legitimate way for you
to get data you should respect that and download it.

