I built a house once.....

As writers we need to make sure that we are not plagiarizing. If we get something from someone else we need to say where we got it; credit where credit is due. Imagine that you spent years and years building a house and finally, at long last, you finished it and someone came and took credit for it. I know I'd be heartbroken. All that hard work was for nothing. And maybe someone's paper isn't a house, but it could be something they really prize and in some cases it could have taken them years to complete. It's their work, so we need to credit them.

Aside from just giving credit though, we need to make sure we don't take the information out of context. For instance if we're talking about our government and we want to prove someone hates it we could quote them saying, "It's bad." But are they actually talking about the government? It's our responsibility to keep things in context so we don't mislead people. It's also our responsibility to do our research so that when people are reading our papers on whatever we're writing they can know it's true.

The responsibility of us as a researcher is to make sure we are using reliable sources. If I quote a 3 year old giving her opinion on public education then I'm really not getting information from a reliable source. If, however, I quote a passage from a scholarly journal than the information is going to be more reliable and can actually be trusted and used.

As a reader it's our responsibility to make sure we are actually reading the right things if we really want the information. I know we've all looked on Wikipedia for information at least once, but if we're trying to actually get good information on something we should probably be looking at articles or books that we know can be trusted.