I’m relatively new to the blogging arena. Even at nearly a year of semi-consistent posting, there’s still alot that I don’t know—mostly about content. My biggest concern has always been, what do I post from other sources?

I actually use WordPress for a couple of different types of sites. There’s this site—a personal blog, and then there’s those that use a modified version of WordPress for community-oriented web sites, like for a ski club.

In the case of the ski club, we post alot of articles about the sales of mountains and such found from newspapers. I usually just get these things emailed to me. I felt uncomfortable posting them verbatim, but the club is small and it was nice to have content. I used a blockquote and sited the newspapers, but I still didn’t feel too great about it. After reading this article from Lorelle on WordPress, it’s clear that this was completely wrong and thankfully, there’s a pretty reasonable guideline that she points out.

Be careful with what you copy from other blogs and resources. You maybe restricted by many copyright web standards and policies which state, like my copyright policy, that fair use is restricted to 10% of the post content, or approximately 400 words.

This seems fair. I’m a typographer at heart so just posting a link seems so painfully unattractive on the great expanses of my blog or a white backed “News” page. Having something to whet the appetite, as well as give me some heft for a post, really helps me. Sure, I could write something but in some cases, I have nothing to say—I’m just stating the facts, as in the case of the ski club. I also suffer from what Lorelle describes as somewhat common desire:

The intention behind copying and pasting such lists on another blog is usually done out of support and caring. They want to help the original blogger spread their helpful list around. They also want to store this list on their blog for their own reference, and hopefully help their readers by supplying the list.

I suffer most heavily from the bolded portion.

To me, I thought that to be “good enough” you could just post the whole gosh darn thing and then put a link to the source to give them credit. I clearly don’t want to plagiarize, but I also want to display the whole thing, like in a personal sketchbook or something. What if it disappears? And yes, maybe I am too lazy to click for more details. But this is wrong. I admit it. I never felt 100% comfortable with it anyway.

If you post the whole thing, there’s no incentive to go to the source, and the source deserves your traffic. That’s the support. Not cutting and pasting.

So what am I going to do? Well, I don’t have THAT many posts here (250-ish) and I have infinitely less on the ski club site, so I am going to redo ALL of them where I quote the entirety of a source. I will see what the site’s commons license states and if I can’t find one, I’ll use Lorelle’s suggestion above. Before, without a guideline, I erred on the greedy side. I’m an information monger, an addict even. And now that will stop. I’m sure that the four of you out there reading this will appreciate it.

So if you want to support your sources in the truest sense, then drive people to THEIR site. Don’t plagiarize and think a blockquote will make it better.

**UPDATE**

As I am going through the ski club site, I’ve decided to add another qualifier to what I will post in its entirety and what I will not. For the ski club, when there are pricing charts or event lists for a mountain, anything that we would conceivably make into a flyer and hand out to our membership—those things will be posted in their entirety. I consider our site to be as much an electronic bulletin board for our members as anything else. I think this is a fair line to draw. Also, as a side note, many of our pages are password protected to some degree, so the intent is for this information to only go to our members anyway.

**UPDATE II - What me waffle?**

Considering Lorelle’s comment below (which was much appreciated, by the way) I’m going to go one step further and try to be super squeaky clean with the ski club web site and link even to those things that would conceivably be flyers. I still think that I have a valid point, especially since our club already buys bulk tickets from these mountains, which is no small purchase. Our members are already going to go there physically as well,, which is probably even more valuable than going to their web site. And I also feel strongly about the electronic bulletin board aspect of what our site was created to do, and the limits that password protection presents both physically and conceptually. But, if we can do it right, then let’s give it a shot. The only impediment I see is the will of the membership. Not too friendly in general so they might crack the whip as to what they want, and they do sign my checks. That situation is a whole ‘nother post all on it’s own. Who calls the shots, and when do you have to draw the line professionally about potential plagiarism?