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Visitors to the BBC’s online news site find dispatches from all over the world. But they aren’t all from the broadcaster’s network of journalists.

Instead, the Web site of the British Broadcasting Corp. relies on edited reports from wire services including the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and others, not all credited to those agencies.

With the proliferation of news sources on the Web, the use of wire-service reports on subjects or places where news organizations don’t have their own staff has become much more common. And in an era when blogs and other sites are filled with material from other sources, the standards of crediting wire services — so readers know where their news is coming from — are becoming fuzzier.

The BBC’s approach to using wire services is attracting notice. In part that is because its main news site, news.bbc.co.uk or bbcnews.com, is one of the most popular: 800 million BBC news and sports articles are downloaded monthly. It also is because the BBC appears to rely on wire services for longer stories without giving them credit.

For example, on April 18, the BBC site published an Agence France-Presse article on film censorship in the United Arab Emirates, without clearly identifying AFP as the source. United Press International picked up the story and said it came from the BBC.

The BBC’s online approach has been a matter of debate since the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom printed an email that Anthony Massey, a staffer on the BBC’s foreign desk in London, sent to all staff in the foreign-news section. “News Online is not a news organization,” he wrote of the Web site. “It’s a rewrite service of other’s people copy, mostly from news agencies. Which they don’t check.” He later issued an apology and said he was wrong. Mr. Massey declined to comment for this article.