Hope i can change your mood, not your mind,

Sidney

To bad you feel this way, and I do think this whole thing had been blown out of proportion. Since I did give him credit and provided a link to his site. I did also say I compiled this list. As in “To put together or compose from materials gathered from several sources” via The Free Online Dictionary. I also never said that I wrote that material. The extra 12 items I wrote myself.

For the last 5 years i’ve been putting time an effort in writing quality content for my readers, people like you, making sure all my source files are correct and online and placing it on this weblog for the world to see.

And if John or you for that matter, send me an email saying / asking to put this in order, no problem and i’ll correct it. But I don’t think that an e-lynching is in order.

Hope you are feeling better now,

Cheers,
Sidney

Since the article i posted here contains some oh Johns points as posted on this link http://johnlindquist.com/2009/08/28/10-things-every-senior-flash-developer-should-know/ i will begin my defense.

First off i’m not deleting any of the comments you posted. I like your honesty. And you have the right to ventilate your mind aswell.

As for my defense:
I already gave him credit in this post, I also added other items but nobody seems to care.
I agree with all of you i didn’t give him proper credit.
I will update this post to do so.

I do think this whole thing has been pulled out of proportion.

So John if you are reading this, I credit you for the parts you wrote. I love you

Sidney

Nice post, but I’ve read some of this before at John Lindquist’s blog – at first I thought it was a straight copy of John’s post because it’s really hard to see the attribution – you’ve linked to it but it isn’t obvious the majority of the post is from another source. Might be an idea to provide a better attribution, using quotes or John’s name?

When you quote somebody, the appropriate practice is to cite them and use a different visual style to indicate that you’re quoting.

For example: The following items are from *linked* this excellent blog post by John Lindquist *end link*, and then put all the stuff that you copy-pasted from his blog in a box out or something of that ilk in order to differentiate clearly other people’s words and work from your own.

I know you included a couple of links, but you really needed to go much further in being open about what was your own content and what was just copy-pasta.

You say “what I notice is that people give them self more credit that they have” – this is exactly what you are guilty of here. You represent yourself as writing this content when really you just copied and adjusted it a little.

I once hired a junior dev who presented as his own work various flash games where really all he’d done was re-skin and adjust a few variables. Six months later we had to fire him, but it was the dishonesty that sucked – not just the lies he told us, but the dishonesty inside him – he really believed he hadn’t done anything wrong because he genuinely thought that what he’d done was ‘flash programming’.

If you’re writing a blog and you don’t understand the principles of appropriate citation, quotation and reference then in this situation you’re the person who thinks he knows more than he does.

John Lindquist puts an enormous amount of energy into his high quality written and video posts for the dev community. You at least owed him the courtesy of informing him that you’d lifted his post content and asking whether he was happy with the way you’d done it – I assume he would have asked for you to be clearer about what was his content and what was your own.

As someone who also spends a lot of time on my tech blog posts, and who contributes to open source software, I know that the reason we spend hours on this stuff is partly that we learn an enormous amount for ourselves in doing that work.

When you copy-pasta someone else’s work you cheat everybody – the original author, the readers (who would benefit from other posts on John’s blog) and yourself, because you don’t get that learning that would have come from thinking this through in depth and actually adding some analysis.

You should put this right – John (and the other author) deserves a public apology. Then you need to go and educate yourself about how writers – in print or online – can build on other people’s words and work without misrepresenting them as their own.

Stray