I was reading my old posts and comments and came across something interesting.

At some time in the past, a commenter mentioned a quote attributed to Jerry Falwell. ("So-called gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you.") At the time I was willing to concede that Falwell may have said it, but wrote it off as heated rhetoric in the midst of a political debate.

Later, I tired to track down the original source of the quote and ran into something interesting. As so often is the case in the internet age, there are quotes that appear hundreds of places, yet seem to have no origin. They are "well documented", as any given article can cite five or ten others as a source, yet none of them ever cite a primary source. Instead the quote is cited over and over, each article citing another, all forming a huge knot of self-reference. If someone wants to "prove" the quote existed, they will have no trouble, a google search turns up thousands of "sources", and those sources cite thousands more, but, if anyone follows the trail, they find that the articles all cite one another, and there is no original source in sight.

Wikipedia has made this even easier. One example, of a non-political nature, brought this home to me. I was reading an article on porphyry, and saw that the rediscovery of a mine in Egypt was attributed to "Bruton". I knew that the name should be "Burton", but, to make sure, tried to search "porphyry and Bruton", to make sure my memory was not deceiving me. However, I learned an important lesson. There are thousands of sites which cut and paste from wikipedia to form their own essays. So, any mistakes in wikipedia, or any deliberate lies, get reproduced over and over, until the web is flooded with disinformation. (And should anyone then use this wrong data for their own independent writing, we end up with even more false citations...) Fortunately, I found a reproduction of a journal from the 1880's online and found the original source (the wikipedia author appears to have actually plagiarized the article, but with a misspelling), and the name was indeed Burton, not Bruton.

I have also seen something similar with "Truther" sites. These sites attempting to show the "truth" behind the events of 9/11/2001 all seem to have copious citations. Some of these citations are to primary sources, though often of rather dubious value. But most are not even that useful. Many of the supposed citations on "truther" sites just point to other truther sites, which, in turn, point to still other truther sites, and, eventually, they point back to the original site itself, forming a massive ring of self-referential "proof". In other words, if one follows them long enough, he will discover that the truther sites often use themselves as sources, though they quote themselves via a long chain of intermediate sites.

I mention all this because I have seen this trap catch many unwary writers. Time after time I have been confronted with "facts" or "statistics" in an argument online which turn out to be of this nature. Yes, they are published, maybe even published several times, Google turns up 100,000 hits or more, and yet they have no original source. They appear to have come out of thin air and multiplied overnight to fill the web.

The quote claiming George Bush called the Constitution a "damn piece of paper" appears to be of this nature, I have yet to find a primary source, even if it is reproduced in thousands of places. Similarly some of the quotes relating to WTC 7 and "pulling it", especially the idea that "pull it" is demolition jargon, are also of this nature. And there are dozens more.

It is a problem which will only get worse as the internet expands, and there is no real cure as far as I can see. So, all I can say is be careful. Whenver someone claims that a statement is true because it comes from wikipedia, or because it produced X hundred thousand google hits, or even if it is cited in dozens of online journals, don't believe it. Hold out for a primary source, otherwise you may be buying in to one of these pseudo-quotes.

UPDATED 01/01/2008

Oddly enough Dennis Prager raised the same point todayin an article about Will Smith being misquoted.

I love when synchronicity makes my writing suddenly relevant.

UPDATED 05/25/2008

I found yet another instance of a misleading headline. The Telegraph published an essay under the headline "Pope Benedict Attacked by Catholic Church's Most Senior Theologians". The problem being that the entire article is about a single former theologian, Fr. Kueng, who has been prohibited from teaching theology due to his opposition to the doctrine of papal infallibility. Nor is it even really an attack, but more about a partial reconcilliation betweent he two, despite Fr. Kueng's disappointment that the pope will not adopt the liberalizing  proposals of Vatican II. Admittedly, he followed up the reconciliation with some mixed statements to the press, but even thsoe fall short of being an "attack".

So, while the article claims that several top theologians are attacking the pope, the article is really about a single priest, no longer allowed to teach theology, who has at least partly reconciled with  the pope.But should someone want to write about church opposition to the pope, they could cite this headline and have a fairly good chance of duping at least part of their readership due to the misleading title.