Attribution?

[Laz]

Hey all, I'm not trying to pick a fight, but something is bothering me a little...

I participate in another forum (http://www.the dailycolumn.com), and I'm a moderator at another (www.guitarnoise.com), and both places put a high value on proper attribution. If you post a joke, or a story, or lyrics, that are not your own, you always provide a link, or reference, or simply "I heard this in the bar last night." Anything to make it clear what is from your own mind, and what you are passing on from someone else.

Here at TF, there seems to be less concern about this. I just read a post that seemed to be from the author, but was later attributed to someone else by one of the replies. Changed the entire tone of the posting.

So should this bother me or not?

[Detomah]

Official news stories on TF always (when remembered) give credit to the original author.

User threads and posts is down to the the user themselves.

Some of it is down to the individual, some down to whether they remember or not, some down to the odd user wanting the post to appear as their own.

I would never dictate to the community to post links and credits for absolutely every single thing they ever did though, otherwise TF would end up just as a fancy directory.

There is no set thing enforced put it that way, except for official news. But even then, it is easy to forget about the odd one when your doing a news run of 20 odd pieces of news.

Does it actually bother you? If so, why?

You have to remember, virtually every bit of text on the internet starts off as being someone elses work somewhere down the lines and ends up forming a pyramid of information throughout millions of sites. just the same as if it is on TV, or on the radio, everything starts off as having just 1 single source and spreads and virtually nobody anywhere is so unique to only utter their own unique words on every single occasion.

I personally quote little snippets from films all the time, in posts on TF and other forums, in spoken word in the house, with friends on the phone, etc, I wouldn't dream of giving the author credit for them every time I use them though, yeah I know that's an extreme, but it works down to pretty much the same thing.