[Ultimatt]

> There is no statement about giving proper credit (vanity) or not being allowed to reinvent the wheel without first making damn sure that you are indeed reinventing.

Crediting someone is not about vanity, at all. It's so in the future someone else can see where to go for ideas you've used, what the general thought and progress was that lead to an idea. See "scholarship" in the linked article. Crediting people facilitates scholarship and knowing the context of an idea. In theory you should be able to trace all human thought that lead to an idea, and what else those people were thinking at the time. Amazingly in modern science that's essentially possible. Most papers have an acknowledgements section where you even acknowledge conversations or private letters that lead to an idea. It's not vanity, even in the world of tinkering its worth crediting people with the input for your ideas and the source of your material as it makes it easier for someone else to riff off of your tinkering.

It's not about avoiding reinventing the wheel either. It's about knowing all the criteria for wheelness, knowing what has been done before and what is widely accepted as a wheel rather than a roller or a track. Is there a body of related work that might apply in the abstract, if rollers are like wheels perhaps roller maths would be useful, perhaps a development in roller technology has not been applied in principal to wheels and could be a breakthrough.

Both of these together are how you actually push things forwards. Giving credit especially is highly misunderstood. If I want to know if one paper Im using is a weird off shoot of thought of the author or not, what else were they working on, where did their inspiration come from, is there more I can get from their direction, or is there somewhere I can go they never dreamed of etc. That transparency is actually amazingly powerful for the creative process.