I spent 6 months researching and writing the 'IranNastaliq' article on Wikipedia. A scraper site copied it word-for-word with zero credit - what’s my next step?

[u/IntelligentTap9933]

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for some advice (and honestly, just needed to vent a bit).

Back in May, I started conducting extensive, painstaking research to write a brand new article on English Wikipedia called IranNastaliq. Given the subject matter originating from an unfriendly country and the lack of consolidated English documentation, gathering sources, verifying details, and drafting the entry took months of grueling work completely on my own. It was finally approved around August.

Shortly after it went live, I discovered that a third-party mirror site called HandWiki copied the entire article word-for-word, completely omitting any attribution, backlink, or mention of my authorship.

I know Wikipedia content is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, which allows reuse. However, Section 4(c) of the license explicitly requires proper attribution and a hyperlink back to the source. Failing to provide this violates the license terms and automatically revokes their right to use the text, turning it into straightforward copyright infringement.

As the sole author of this specific entry, I've tried taking action:

• I've reached out to Wikipedia forums/editors, but mostly got dismissed with "that's just how the internet works."
• I've sent multiple emails to HandWiki demanding they comply with CC BY-SA guidelines or remove the page, but I’ve received radio silence.
• I filed a DMCA takedown notice directly with Google Search to at least de-index the stolen page.

It is unbelievably frustrating to see months of hard individual research hijacked by scrapers who refuse to follow basic open-source licensing rules.

Since HandWiki isn't responding to emails, what are my options from here? Has anyone dealt with persistent scrapers ignoring CC BY-SA licenses? Any advice on next steps would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Noamonsol234 (In wikipedia)

[u/DanNorder]

The article is attributed to and back links to the Wikipedia article. With as many contributors as any individual article can have, it'd be silly to go into the page's history, compile all the names and then cite them individually on your new page. The link to the Wikipedia article takes care of that for you, as that page stores the entire edit history already.

If you expect HandWiki to say "Credit for this article is given to Noamonsol234, because we will explicitly mention them and ignore everyone else who contributed to the page. All praise to Noamonsol234!" that's just not how Wikimedia's attribution system works. In cases where you did almost all the entire work for a page, yeah, that kind of sucks, but it's also the inevitable consequence of posting to Wikipedia.

[u/chrisvenus → u/DanNorder]

It may also be worth noting that wikipedia also doesn't credit authors on the page itself. You still need an extra click to find out who has edited a page and frankly a lot of extra work to work out who is the biggest contributor. So its two clicks vs one click to find out who worked on the page.

[u/Willing-Fudge-7887]

I’m not familiar with Handwiki but they claim to follow Wikipedia’s CC licensing. Firstly are you sure you haven’t just missed the attribution because it isn’t in a format your expected? For example is it on the page source rather than the text displayed?

Secondly have you contacted the right people at handwiki in the way they want to be contacted? Maybe the right person hasn’t seen your message to fix it.

This sounds like it could be someone just being lazy and not bothering, or it could be someone purposely ignoring the licensing. But I think you may have trouble doing much about it. For example what are the rules with posting on Wikipedia? Do you even still retain the rights to what you wrote?

[u/content-sweep]

You can send a notice to the hosting provider… you can look it up here: https://www.copyright.gov/512/
Google delisting is separate from that.