Thank you for the shout-out. I need the encouragement. I am not always good with attribution, thought I try.
Off-topic- but in the public eye. Part of the problem is the medium that we are using. This blog, and most others often equate first with best. A quick post, garners more views, and thus more adulation/criticism, v.s. something that is posted later on, that often seems ignored. BoingBoing’s readers are better than most at parsing through the long replies, and that is one of the reasons I post here.
Add to that, most site don’t encourage attribution. I don’t even know if BoingBoing has a distinct policy on it, beyond the prefunctery, “Note where you found it.”, as that doesn’t require that their bloggers dig deeper into the content that they are reporting on or creating.
BoingBoing has gamified interactions with the blog by adding badges that note everything from filling out a biography to posting a link that generates 1000 clicks to giving 50 likes 20 days in a row(Did you know there was a maximum number of likes?). There are no badges for, “Proper Attribution” or “Corrects Mistakes”, “mea culpa”, or “Provides reasons for edits”. All of these might improve the quality of the posts, or at the very least be inline with BoingBoing’s perceived values.
Perhaps we should bring this up, en masse, with the powers that be.
