Citation, References and Attribution.

manuelhooks (72)memberin Steem4Nigeria • 19 days ago (edited)

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Attribution

Content writers and creators can confirm that creating innovative and refined intellectual works will demand a significant amount of time, effort, and resources.
Therefore, it is essential to acknowledge and credit the pioneering contributions of the scholars, researchers, artists, photographers, and thinkers in their respective fields, and most especially when we want to build upon their valuable work or use some excerpts from their work to add colour and garnishing to ours.
In most cases, our content simply needs some illustrations or graphics, a powerful quote or some statistics to drive home the main point or enhance clarity.
If you have to borrow any of such items, it will only be fair and honest to give credit to the original owner. The act of giving due credit to the original owner of an artwork, a picture, a video, a soundtrack, music or any other intellectual property is known as Attribution.

And failure to make proper attribution for any borrowed media is known as plagiarism - the theft of intellectual property, which is an offensive and dishonest behaviour constituting a serious breach of the Steemit code of conduct and attracting steep penalties. Plagiarism is such a serious case that newcomers can not escape by claiming ignorance.

When do I need a source?

If the content you are posting contains information you got from a primary source, you will not need any attribution, and the same applies to information that is common knowledge, it needs no source.
The fact that the sun rises from the east and settles in the west is common knowledge.
When reporting the result of an experiment or observation, you will not need any attribution; just tell us it rained heavily in your area. The same applies when you are telling us how you spent your day.

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On the other hand. When presenting information from a secondary source, you will be expected to provide the source. That includes any piece of information you are not expected to have or know on your own.
If you should say "There are 247,775 people working on Wall Street", the question will be, how did you know? Did you count them?

It will be far better if you say "According to the Daily Trust Magazine, there are 247,775 people working in Wall Street" followed by a link to the magazine.

So if you are writing about tomatoes and how they make a good red stew with your pictures and the steps to cooking it, you will not need a source for attribution, but if that post becomes so informative that it starts providing the health benefits of tomato stew, how it contains vitamin Q+ and can fight free radicals.
You definitely did not run the test or conduct the experiment, so you have to give credit to whoever conducted the experiment and made the information available. But if you did the experiment, then show with evidence.

This same principle applies if you borrow a picture from Pixabay.com or any royalty-free website or application. Building on such borrowed media by editing it will still need honest attribution in honour of the original owner.

The whole case worsens if you borrow from a site that says no free borrowing with copyright protections because its pictures or other media content are all for sale. Simply because you can see it, or can copy it does not make it free for grasp. Avoid newspaper sites when hunting for media to garnish your content, even taking very little is still a big problem.

My advice to new Steemians is, don't borrow any online material to add garnishing to your post, make sure everything in your content is yours, till that time when you can identify royalty-free depositories and have learnt how to make proper attributions. It is so complex that you could be charged with stealing from yourself. It's called self-plagiarism, and recently I have heard terms like content recycling.

Conclusion and Invitation

This is the end of this post, but definitely not the end of attribution as a topic. Some grey areas in this subject will need clarification, and I would really love to show some practical examples of proper attributions from royalty-free depositories.

I am now inviting @onyii03, @marvii, @emerson-25, @axgustine, @nspidoz, @mydoctor, @modelnova, @goodnews2020, @ruthyjay, @okere-blessing, @favourite01 @pbridgesar700 and @mayjay to have a say on this topic.