Glossary: Attribution
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Attribution simply means clearly identifying the actual, genuine source of a piece of information, a quote, an image, a statistic, so that a reader can trace it back reliably and evaluate it independently rather than simply accepting it on faith alone without any real question at all ever being asked.
Clear attribution is a basic marker of genuinely accountable communication: it allows any errors to be traced back to their true origin and properly corrected, and it lets a reader weigh a source's own track record before deciding how much confidence a given claim actually and genuinely deserves in return.
Content that circulates widely with no attribution at all attached to it, especially images, quotes or statistics passed along without any indication whatsoever of their origin, should generally be treated more cautiously than material with a clear, checkable and genuinely verifiable source directly attached to it from the very start.