Depends

Coffman finds her next target in the footnotes of the article about the tank division. This one’s name is Franz Kurowski, and he seems to pop up all over the place. Kurowski served in the Luftwaffe. After the war, he tried his hand at all sorts of popular writing, often with a pseudonym to match: Jason Meeker and Slade Cassidy for his crime fiction and westerns, Johanna Schulz and Gloria Mellina for his chick lit. But his accounts of the Second World War made him famous under his own name. Kurowski’s stories weren’t subtle. As the German historian Roman Töppel writes in a critical essay: “They depict war as a test of fate and partly as adventure. German war crimes are left out—much unlike allied war crimes.”

To understand this dubious chronicler better, Coffman goes to Google, where she comes upon a book called The Myth of the Eastern Front. It describes how, in the immediate aftermath of the war, characters like Kurowski worked to rehabilitate the image of the German army—to argue that a few genocidal apples had spoiled the barrel. With a guy like Hitler to pin the blame on, the rest was easy. The so-called “myth of the clean Wehrmacht” took root on both sides of the Atlantic: German society needed to believe that not everyone who wore a gray uniform was evil, and the Americans were courting every anti-Communist ally they could find. Then, in the mid-1990s, a museum exhibit cataloging the crimes of the Nazi-era military traveled throughout Germany. An odd situation emerged: Germans began to speak more honestly about the Wehrmacht than non-Germans did.

When Coffman reads this, something clicks. She is dealing with a poisonous tree here. She shouldn’t be throwing out individual pieces of fruit. She should be chopping it off at the trunk. She starts to pivot from history (the facts themselves) to historiography (the way they’re gathered). She begins to use Wikipedia to document the false historical narrative, and its purveyors, and then make the fight about dubious sources rather than specific articles.

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/

I feel like news sources used to link to their sources too, but now it seems to be an infinite chain of links to their own articles, never directly taking you to the first hand source of information (unless they are the source).

And very often it’s dead links or sources that don’t say what the article pretends…

And here I am fixing missing sources on some wiki articles just yesterday.

The thing is, if the place you’re getting your information from doesn’t list it’s sources, you can’t trust it. Whenever I’m researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don’t just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.

Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.

Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it’s just their opinion until you check and follow the sources…