I thought this was an interesting case of "what's better, Wikipedia or another website?"

Take a quick look at the Wikipedia article about Jacobson Stores.

Then take a look at this history of the retail chain.

Clearly, the second resource is far superior to the Wikipedia version, except for the Wikipredictable "list" mentality that constructs a comprehensive roster of former store locations.

But then I got to thinking, WHO WROTE THE EXTENSIVE HISTORY of the company that is now scraped, unattributed, to four different Internet sites?

I hope that this particular case will inspire a good legal discussion about unattributed content and copyright on the Internet, and I don't really intend for it to serve as a "let's bash Wikipedia" thread, but feel free if that's your wish. Sincerely, I am quite curious to know who wrote the long history of Jacobson's, only to have its attribution (apparently) forever lost, and what that bodes for law and the Internet.

Greg, nobody cares about copyright on the internet, except music and film production companies that have enough power (see "money") to enforce it. For text bits smaller than a book, forget it. In theory it's the same, in practice, which is all that counts, the law has washed its hands of all of it, because there's nobody with the $ to get it done.

EXCEPT for copyright issues, sec 230 basically leaves all responsiblity in the hands of posters, if you can find them. Which you can't. Hence, for text, you're screwed there too, unless the Computer-Interactive-Service (ISP or BBS) is one that makes people ID carefully to get on. Even then, it would be a tough scrabble, and would take more $ than it would ever be worth. The reason there's no money in text production (writing) these days, is that it's too easy to copy. Though copying is illegal, there's not enough money to prosecute illegal copying, since copying is so easy.

Perhaps with a better encrypted future and the possiblity of micropayments (which is really what drives this-- you can pay 99 cents to iTunes but not 5 cents to iArticles), it will work. Meanwhile, writers are hurting.

That ties into my main point -- where is the ORIGINAL writer's version/post of this short history of Jacobson Stores? I have to believe that it was electronically rendered at some point, simply because I doubt any scraper site would go to the bother of transcribing something they found in a print-on-paper source. Google News turned up nothing, as did Google Books. I reckon the piece was first published in 1998, well into the "Internet era", but yet there's no trace of the original, and I therefore feel sorry for the original author.

The one you linked says at the bottom "Source: International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 21. St. James Press, 1998."

Answers.com (non-wikipedia) contains substantially the same content, instead of that source line at the bottom it has a byline "— Pamela L. Shelton"

This site's profile of Target says "International Directory of Company Histories, Volume 61 (1990) by Sina Dubovoj, Pamela L. Shelton, David E. Salamie", so it's likely the byline on Answers is legitimate.

Thank you, Random! I clearly wasn't paying close enough attention.

Since the International Directory appears to be a hard-cover bound annual, I'll bet that St. James Press at some point sold off the electronic rights to the content of its old edition(s). Even used copies of the Volume 21 (1998) still go for a minimum of $117, so I'm still a bit surprised that the content was released and not controlled more carefully.

Anyway... you learn something every day.