My point isn't that it's unfair to demand a certain standard of citation, if that's what you're saying.

My point is that, until I started reading about this particular controversy, I had never heard anyone suggest that it's acceptible to use whole paragraphs of another writer's material in your story as long as you say so in an author's note. The degree of formality of such a note isn't what's flummoxing me; it's what the note would be noting.

The issue here is whether it's okay for, say, Cassie Claire to incorporate whole chunks of, say, Pamela Dean in her stories without any citation at all. I think everyone agrees this is bad. All I'm saying is that, even if she provided complete citations from the very beginning, the resulting fanfic would be a bizarre hodge-podge of quotations, which barely seems worth the trouble of assembling whether you provide citations or not.

I have absolutely no involvement in Harry Potter fandom and even less of an idea how this sort of thing is handled--for all I know people routinely create ficloaf from other stories' leftover bits all the time, and it's considered a completely valid artform as long as one gives proper credit. People seem to be arguing that it would have been okay if Heidi were doing a story like that, which I find odd because I wasn't aware anyone was doing stories like that.