Matt Cutts, Stitching Content and Wikipedia’s Legitimacy

Matt Cutts recently talked about Stitching Content and Wikipedia again came in this context. Here is why Google definitely should think to not consider Wikipedia as white. Agreed with him. This article is a different type of discussion which we usually avoid – our niche is fully ‘how to’ , troubleshooting and helpful articles as summary on bigger technologies, bigger at least to the common users.

Why Matt Cutts recently talked about Stitching Content?

There might be some guess about the person who asked the question to Matt Cutts. Guess is not quite scientific or logical and possibly should not be mentioned! Anyway, the person raised a serious point : is creating text content by borrowing 1-2 lines from here and there and giving link below is a great idea ? Watch this video for what Matt Cutts exactly said about Stitching Content :

Definitely, the method of Stitching Content or whatever is is said, clearly violates copyright – honestly, there are possibly few million websites which performs these actions to get good SERP for high value keywords. Stitching Content is really not required for creating a helpful content, reading some text books, automatically makes a sense of knowledge that is enough to write an article. Google Legal, definitely one of the best service offered by Google, although fully free. But, the burden of doing DMCA by the writer and the process and pain of checking by Google Legal Team – frankly renders it ineffective.

Definitely, rarely some external citation or linking is required, like giving the url to Github repository or WordPress codex.

Where Matt Cutts is not Right about Stitching Content related to Wikipedia ?

Citation is only required for Academic Papers! Wikipedia is neither an academic paper nor a dictionary. The biggest issue becomes prominent with high value keywords, see the example here :

You can also read this article – The Wrongly Self Labeled Encyclopedia. You will start to laugh aloud if you see the examples of this article – Who is Copying From Whom? . The doubt about Wikipedia is nothing new, Matt Cutt’s page on Wikipedia also fired to be deleted :

Wikipedia, unfortunately has been a Link-Selling website. Want to buy some links or have a page on Wikipedia? Contact us, give us money, we will with warranty provide you the ‘Service’. Honestly, this author has not such mentality to get such services.
A pdf link or tut link towards Rackspace or Amazon for Cloud Computing, does not make any reference – its obvious that they are the vendors and will try their best to sell products or services.

Articles on Health are dubious. Even the technical article with lower keyword values are not rightly written. Wikipedia undoubtedly has a value for historical materials. Definitely presence of Wikipedia is a trouble in SERP, but more than the visitors, the biggest trouble is faced by the Business and yes, to some extent AdWords get affected too.

Freebase exists. Google should should give more importance to Freebase to fetch data from real person.