Comment by pitdesi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pitdesi | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be some sort of standard for citing other peoples work, sort of like an updated Chicago Manual of Style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation#Citation_styles) for online publications. These days we have all these content mills that put out very little original work... I don't know what the proper method should be, how much work you can take etc. Also remember this - The New York Times spent weeks writing an article about how Wal-mart and Target learn your secrets and then Forbes wrote a knock-off that stole a bunch of their traffic. http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...

This also reminds me that as much as possible we should try to link to the original source on HackerNews, it's in the guidelines! (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Back in July, I spent a lot of time putting together an infographic for FeeFighters on the tech boom and bubble (http://feefighters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tech-...). We got links back from tons of magazines, including Forbes, Mashable, Fast Company, etc. Many of them didn't link to either us or KissMetrics (our partner who did the design work), but most complied after sending an email or tweet. One place, Bostinno - refused to link to us at all, despite multiple tweets and emails to them, for some reason deciding to credit Mashable: http://bostinno.com/2011/07/13/are-we-in-a-tech-boom-or-bubb... Massholes.

Former journalist here. Some years ago I attempted to create a standard called "Source Blocks" (see http://www.ilamont.com/2008/11/my-new-journalism-experiment.... ). It's basically a paragraph of explanatory text that the author places at the end of the article, identifying what sources he/she used in the course of researching the article. It looked something like this.

Sources cited, referenced, or consulted: Blog.basturea.com, American Journalism Review (ajr.org), Editorsweblog.org, Glasshouse.waggeneredstrom.com, Techmeme.com, thelongtail.com, Washingtonpost.com, Wired

The problem was, even without linking these sources, it took discipline to keep a running list while work was being done, and/or time at the end of the writing process to do the source block writeup. And the system did not account for higher "weight" for certain sources, much less the details that came from each source. It attracted a little attention, but I was only able to keep it up for another year.

At the time, someone suggested creating some sort of browser extension to track all of the sources, which might have helped a little with other websites but would have been useless for phone or F2F interviews that occupy many journalists' time.

You've re-invented a chunk of project Xanadu:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

Congratulations!

similar ideas are announced every few months and have been for the past decade+

most recent:

http://curatorscode.org/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/business/media/guidelines-...

there are two real and practical solutions to this problem:

1. what you are witnessing in this very thread. it works.

2. an idea that I am advocating which is that sources are marked up as microdata:

http://schema.org/CreativeWork

Google and other search engines then take this into account in rankings, as do social media sites, etc. creates a machine readable hierarchy of attribution

this gets discussed endlessly and i've switched off from the conversation, I am more interested in getting google, twitter et al to support the microdata, the publishers and CMS providers will fall into line thereafter

It's not hard. Firefox under Unix has an interesting property. When you select text, you end up with the following targets for an X Window select operation:

    TIMESTAMP
    TARGETS
    MULTIPLE
    text/html
    text/_moz_htmlcontext
    text/_moz_htmlinfo
    UTF8_STRING
    COMPOUND_TEXT
    TEXT
    STRING
    text/x-moz-url-priv

With this, I was able to add an extension to my editor to obtain the URL, pull the page, pull the title and generate an HTML BLOCKQUOTE with proper CITE attribute with the highlighted text included.

Please share!!!

> There needs to be some sort of standard for citing other peoples work

You mean like <a href>, <cite>, <blockquote cite>, ...

Not at all surprised bostinno never linked you, they're literally a spam site complete with 20+ HN accounts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com