Alpha History Gets an “F”

 Alpha History is an Australian site that claims to be curated by credentialed academics.  Shall we say that they do not provide much evidence to put confidence in their “scholars.” Their post on Nazi propaganda quotations includes the quotation we are following, along with other fabricated quotations.  As usual, they fail to provide sources.  

According to the site:

“Alpha History is written, curated and compiled by qualified teachers and historians. Content on Alpha History is written specifically for students at middle school, high school and undergraduate levels.”

The site has since removed the dubious quotations.

The site also included a lot of copyrighted material from my German Propaganda Archive without credit, but has remedied that.

"Reliable" Sites and the Dubious Goebbels Quotation

I’m particularly annoyed by sites that look reliable, but spread the dubious Goebbels quotation that  this blog is following.  That is almost always a sign that a site should be avoided.

One example is the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team.  On the surface (but only on the surface) it looks to be a scholarly site, although it provides very little information on who is behind it.  However, its page on Joseph Goebbels is headed by the dubious quotation.  I’ve twice e-mailed them, but they haven't removed the material. On the same page, they reproduce a large section of one of my translations, with no credit.

In short, it’s not a site to be recommended.

Sighting Report #8

We're at high season in the election cycle and the quotation continues to spread: 179 new pages in the past week. Most associate Romney or Obama with Goebbels.

Another quotation site has popped up, too.  Crossquotes provides quotations “from a Christian Perspective.” It includes the quotation.  As a Christian myself I like to see people take the trouble to be accurate.

Meanwhile, a Google search for the phrase “truth is the greatest enemy of the State” provides only 166,000 hits, a significant decline.  We find, though, that Google results vary widely so we will wait to see if this represents a long-term decline.  There are still 32,000 pages that attribute the quotation to ‘Joseph M. Goebbels,” although “M” was not his middle initial.

Another Dubious Internet Dictionary of Quotations

A month back we noted Thinkexist, an Internet quotation site that provides no sources for its quotations.

Another such site including the Goebbels quotation is Searchquotes. It claims: “Our goal is to help you by delivering amazing quotes to bring inspiration, personal growth, love and happiness to your everyday life.”  Like Thinkexist, it provides no information on who is behind it, nor does it give sources for its quotations.  It gets about 4,000,000 visitors a month, and probably provides a lot of advertising revenue to its owner, whomever that anonymous person or persons may be.

As always, do not trust anonymous sites of quotations.  Use a good print dictionary of quotations instead.

Dubious Internet Quotation Sites

Books and magazines used to have editors — and good ones still do.  The Internet allows anyone to be his own publisher.  On the one hand that can be good.  The financial barriers to reaching an audience have been eliminated.  However it also means that a great deal of nonsense gets distributed.

This site attempts to combat a small corner of nonsense.  However, other sites promote it.  For example, the popular quotation site Thinkexist.com has the fake Goebbels quotation, and is probably the source for many who cite it.  It apparently gets over a million visitors a year.

What is interesting to us is that the site provides no information at all as to who is behind it.  Nor does it give any sources for the quotations it provides.  It allows visitors to provide feedback — but although we have twice reported that the quotation is a fake it remains on the site.

Compare that with a real print dictionary of quotations.  An excellent example is the Yale Book of Quotations.  The editor assiduously sources quotations, and finds lots of them that are falsely attributed. If you want to be sure the quotation you are using is real, do not depend on anonymous Internet sites