>Naomi,
>
>In the interests of clarity: when giving advice in any professional field, if you publish a response based on work done by another, you MUST reference it. Even if that work was published in a competing venue. To do otherwise is called "plagiarization" and is extremely bad form.
>
>In this case IMHO it is entirely proper and professional to reference an excellent response by Sergey or whoever rather than repackaging/plagiarizing it.

John,

This is the principle indeed. But let it be in principle here, rather than on principle.

First argument: Providing a link is enough, because the original writer(s) will automatically be revealed when the reader follows the link. So, there's no need to provide the link AND to mention the author.

Second argument: Oftentimes the mentioned author is giving a solution that has been inspired by the (mentioned or not) work of others. Or it may even be a full copy of another's work. Or it is nothing more than a link to another place. In these cases it would not be appropriate to mention this specific author. It would give a false idea that he or she is the one who should get all credit.

Third argument, which is covered in part by the second argument, but is ime special enough to mention separately: Certain solutions are actually variations of older solutions. The originator of the older solution is sometimes no longer trackable. The practice is that such a solution has become kind of public domain code. And that should then also apply to the derived variation. In my eyes, there's no 'obligation' to mention the author of the variation in this case and it's not plagiarization.

I wrote in principle, because in case you see a piece of code or a reference without the mentioning of an author, it might be a valid case due to one of the above arguments.