Policies

Those who have been reading my blog all along, know that I make all sorts of links and attributions of various types to source material.  However, I want to take myself to task a little on my recent Rule of Life posting. 

In my somewhat haphazard method of blogging, I tend to write, cut, paste, and incorporate stuff I find online, in books, and that I come up with myself,  to convey what I want to talk about.  I do my best to credit the source, but once in a while I don't get the correction attributions into the posting. I think part of the issue is that I don't consider my words anything I would want to "keep".  However I DO want to honor those who do, they are THEIR words, after all.

As I was posting Rule of Life, it got long, and I wanted to shorten it, so I deleted a some sections, one containing the attribute for  Fr. Rick Lord being the major source of the content for this particular posting.  I want to be sure to clear that up, because they are mostly his words, not mine.

My "policy" is that when I post the entirety of someone's work, or the exact words, I try to link to them. But when I condense, rewrite and mix with other stuff, it can get tough, and to be honest, I don't know how to attribute such a mishmash like that without giving footnotes and that is a lot of work for a blog, not a research paper.

I had a suggestion once, to write something like: "I am grateful to ____ (fill in the blank) for many of the words and ideas above."  Do you, my readers, think this is a good method?  Maybe I should put a disclaimer on the main blog site?  Would that be good?

Comments

[Captian Freedom]

I think that's a good policy. In school we are asked to footnote it, even if we mesh-mash the ideas. Direct quotes are supposed to go under quotes and then a footnote. But that's hard to do on typepad.