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Universal Attribution System for Authors, Creators, Speakers & Media Sources

Published on May 28, 2026

The current relationship system was originally designed around books and literary content, where attribution is relatively simple:

Quote/Excerpt → Book → Author Profile

As the site expands into broader media ecosystems such as movies, television, games, interviews, historical material, and collaborative works, this structure becomes increasingly restrictive. Non-book media often lack a single “author” relationship and instead involve multiple attribution layers including creators, directors, writers, speakers, performers, fictional characters, studios, or collaborative teams.

This task will involve redesigning the attribution architecture so content units such as quotes, excerpts, lyrics, dialogue, scenes, and observations can independently reference:

  • source media objects
  • attributed profiles/people
  • optional speakers or characters
  • associated creators or contributors

The long-term goal is to separate:

source object
≠
creator
≠
speaker
≠
subject

into distinct relationship systems that can scale across all present and future CPTs.

This future architecture will also support improved aggregation rendering across Profile and Artist pages. For example:

  • artist pages rendering all lyrics automatically
  • films and shows supporting quotes/excerpts without requiring book-style author logic
  • profiles aggregating cross-media contributions
  • universal “Featured In” and citation systems across all media types

This task is primarily architectural and relational rather than visual, and will require careful planning to avoid breaking existing book/profile functionality while expanding the system into a fully media-agnostic semantic attribution model.

Published incurrent