A Simple Guide to Text and Image Citation and Why is it important?

Greetings to all new and old members !

It has been an honour to work for STEEMIT PAKISTAN. In order to facilitate the members to improve the quality of their content, I have decided to share some guidelines frequently. I must add that mostly all the members here are producing top notch content. Still someone (new or old member) can learn a thing or two from these guidelines.

Last week, I compiled A Simple Guidline to Post Styling . Many people found that useful. Post styling plays an important role in attracting the audience and curators.

In previous Weekly Engagement Contest, many participants didn't gave proper citations or there was no citation at all.

Citation is giving credit to original creator or author of the published work. It is illegal and morally incorrect to use someone else's work without their permission or giving credit to them.

For example, you post a beautiful picture or write a post that you worked hard on for hours and you see someone else using your work without asking you or giving you the deserved credit and earning bucks through it. How would you feel? Exploited ?!

For this reason, we give citations when we share someone else's work.

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Text Citation

I will explain this with the example of previous Weekly Engagement Contest. The topic was City Life VS Village Life. If you think of points by yourself than its all right, you don't have to cite. But if you read articles and get ideas from others published work then it is essential to reference all the sources. Even if you are phrasing in your own words, you have to mention the sources from where you got the idea in first place. It will not make you low, instead it will make your post look professional. It is completely all right to get ideas from others work but it's a crime to presenting them as your own. And if you are copying word to word from someone else's work, you have to quote it and still give the source.

To write a text in quotes, we use blockquote tag.

I read some of the posts of the contest, some people used main points from other sites. It was all right but it would have been better, if they had mentioned the sources at the end of the post.

I hope next time everyone will take care of that. It will not only make your post look professional but most importantly your credibility as an author will increase as your readers will trust your work.

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Image Citation

The main reason behind writing this post is, I found so many images that were not properly cited in last contest. I tried to point that out to everyone. Almost everyone had given the sources but very few people had given them correctly.

I want to mention again that presenting your google search as a source is not enough. You have to provide the original link because there we can read the licensing information about that image too. Every image you find on interent is not free to use. Some creators don't want their images to be used in any way, some want payment, some want proper credit, some don't allow remixing or editing and some allow it with providing details.

I will share the whole process of finding images and citing them with an example.

1- Search your required image in the Google. Click this filter option button.

2- Click on Image Usage Rights and select Creative Commons Licenses. Google will filter out images with creative common license. Images that are free to use and modify when given proper credit or attribution. Don't select Commercial and other licenses because then Google will display the images that may reuqire payment.

3- Now open any image. I chose the one from Wiki Commons . You can read its licensing detail here too. Now this link can be provided as a source but if you look closely the link to original site is also given. So it is better to give that as a source.

4- Open that original link and check the license details. Read carefully, use the image as per allowed by the creator. This link would be the actual source of the image. Mention this in your post.

When you click on some rights reserved, you will be directed to this:

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If you cannot find the original source and license details of an image then you are not supposed to use it by any means. Find another image or create your own.

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I have explained everything I could think of. You are free to ask any thing in the comments. I hope this will help you all. Let's practise proper citation and avoid plagiarism.

It is hard to earn money but it is harder to earn the rightful one.

P.S . You can also license your images to make it a common practice.

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Best Regards,

@event-horizon
Moderator @steemit-pak