Sources should always be properly acknowledged, and where a text is copy-and-pasted from another website, that site should be identified and a separate link given to the original file and to the home page; any source or background information should also be included. (In the absence of such, the material is probably suspect and oughtn't to be kept). Having said that, a good deal of "sharing" of resources goes on; material has been copied here from Lesley Nelson's site, for example, but she has in her turn drawn on material here. My experience of Cantaria is that it suffers from just as high a proportion of inaccuracies as does the DT; and the majority of sites holding texts for traditional songs credit no source of any kind and give no information at all.

One large, UK-based site occasionally referred to here has simply copied the content of other sites (including the DT), without acknowledgement and in most cases without the background information that makes sense of the material. At present the tune files there are in Noteworthy's native format; to my mind about as useful as a chocolate teapot, though I know that many people like it. That particular site is primarily, however, an attempt to sell the material on CD.

There are honourable exceptions, of course; Susanne and Henry's songbook contains meticulously compiled background information, though in the main from sleevenotes, and Robokopp has improved vastly over the last year or two, now including source information and tunes in many cases where it formerly did not. There are, as we know, other, more specialist sites as well, where proper academic rigour is applied; Bruce Olson's and Greg Lindahl's for example.

There is no reason at all why we cannot develop a genuinely useful and reliable information resource here. The threads will have to be carefully (and ruthlessly) edited, and their existence prominently flagged on the main Forum page; information given without proper source references is unverifiable, and should usually be removed. The "uncritical inclusion" policy that has traditionally pertained here has perhaps now outlived its usefulness; time to get serious about getting it right.

Just the editing looks like too big a job for one person, but I don't know how we might get round that, short of assigning threads to specified individuals.