Why would MyWikiBiz tarnish their reputation by copying the General Mills article straight from Wikipedia?

Doesn't this question simply bring even more traffic to MyWikiBiz? It would seem that site is on a healthy growth trajectory, and now you're just adding to that. I'm sure the site owner, shameless as he must be to -- GASP! -- duplicate and attribute copyleft "share alike" content from Wikipedia, would thank you for this added attention to his site!

There's an old saying, quoted in various forms, "Originality is the art of hiding your sources."

Articles are rarely written from scratch. What differs is the way material is revamped, and unique features added.

Is there any legal reason why they shouldn't plagiarize - as long as they acknowledge?

Weighing up the (in-)significance of the subject matter against the time required to write an article - there's possibly no red-blooded reason to write 'a better article from scratch'.

What Wikipedia critics forget is that Wikipedia content is not uniformly bad. There are many brilliantly written inaccurate articles, many accurate articles written in the dullest way imaginable, and a few poorly written inaccurate articles. If at MyWikiBiz they reviewed the current version of the General Mills article and found it accurate and well-written enough for their purposes, I suppose there's nothing technically wrong with that.

However, they should have had the foresight to know how Wikipedia apologetics and critics would react.

MyWikiBiz couldn't create a better article from scratch in time to score a shot on Wikipedia, so they copied an old version of the article so that they could say they had an article.

MyWikiBiz is a dead horse getting beaten repeatedly with a mouldy club. It has its best days behind it and never ranked highly for many things. Other business wikis are better known and more widely used, like AboutUs.com (which has millions of pages compared to MWB's 50,000). There are a few editors using it as their own personal webhost, the founder, and an organized advertiser user called OmniMediaGroup, who the founder keeps around because it's the only thing giving his site search engine rankings. OMG has made a significant amount of MWB's content, but that content is mostly link spam.

So with no editors around to create anything of worth, MyWikiBiz had nothing to lose by copying Wikipedia. Looking like a hypocrite was better than admitting just how pathetic MWB is.