Credit where it is due

As I begin to post essays to this blog, I do it with some trepidation. Thanks to Google, a few years ago I found excerpts from an essay I had posted on my website (written by my uncle and duly credited) on two or three other sites. The references were copied and pasted – completely uncredited. Just edited into the text as if it were written by the authors of those sites. I was furious, of course, as I get sometimes, and added a line to the page below the essay that I’ll quote here (I think I also emailed them with a complaint):

“This essay is copyrighted. If you quote or use information from this essay in your research or on your web page, please cite this web page as you would any source quoted.”

Thankfully, the excerpts no longer come up when I search, although who knows how the information has become incorporated into other off–line documents. So, I write this note here as a simple request to all of us surfing or posting to the web to respect others’ work – research and writing, still images and other media (don’t know enough about it to include music downloading here). If you use any bit from this site or any other source (site, article, book, etc.), please use quotation marks around a direct quote and give ample information on where you got the quote or the information. (By the way, feel free to use my copyright statement above without citation.)

Several sites offer information on how to cite electronic sources, but a simple citation like this will suffice:

http://www.bestsource.edu/page; accessed Month/Day/Year.

Here’s one citation guide:
http://www.h-net.org/about/citation/

Here’s Wikipedia’s take on Fair Use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Some sites with information on citing sources in genealogy, which can be applied to other topics:
http://www.genealogy.com/19_wylie.html

A simple Google search with ["how to cite" genealogy] brings up plenty of articles and examples.

While we’re on the subject, here are several websites coming under the very broad heading of ethics that may be of interest to some:
http://del.icio.us/airgid/ethics

Here’s my original page that was not cited:
http://bama.ua.edu/~rdobson/family/JamesBoykin.htm