Apparently, pointing out to Trump fans or rabid Brexiteers that they’re being taken for a ride by corrupt, loathsome bastards may make them double down on their commitment to said bastards. Clearly this precautionary principle has been adopted wholesale by Goodreads, to judge from their policy on correcting fake Thucydides quotes; anything that has lots of ‘likes’ from users of the site is not to be deleted, regardless of its proven falsehood. Yes, my occasional mission to give F.B. Jevons and William F. Butler their proper due for ‘Of all manifestations of power…’ and ‘The nation that divides its soldiers from its warriors…’ respectively has a new target. Those two have been sorted out – Jevons gets credit now rather than Thucydides, while somehow the Butler has been deleted as insufficiently worthy, but apparently nothing can be done about ‘peace is an armistice in an endless war’, ‘justice will not come to Athens’ and even, dear gods, ‘a collision at sea can ruin your whole day’.
”We are,” Goodreads tell me, “book review and recommendations site.” Well, yes. So what’s with the quotes?
While we do have quotes on the site, we consider them to be community-owned content and therefore we have strict rules regarding removing.
So, the people of Goodreads have had enough of experts, and resent being talked down to by people who think they know better and want to delete their favourite quotes. I find myself thinking so much more positively of Wikipedia and its editors than I did a few months ago…
Sphinx 
Neville – while I commend your efforts, I’m frankly coming round to the view that there’s not much point. I too have flagged up some instances of fake Thucydides quotes to various websites, with mixed results, but have now abandoned the unequal challenge. I fear that the capacity of the internet for spreading error is so great, that any attempt to resist it invites comparisons with Dame Partington trying to hold back the ocean with her mop. Put another way, the internet simply verifies, on a much larger scale, Thucydides’ comment (1.20) that ‘so lacking in diligence is the pursuit of truth by the many, and they turn instead to whatever is readily to hand’. Apologies for being so gloomy.
I know exactly what you mean, but I’m obsessive enough – and/or have an optimistic view of human nature – to believe that one can at least reduce the level of idiocy in the world, if never eliminate it. There are people out there who don’t care whether something is true or not, but plenty of people, when corrected on the Twitter, are actually pleased; they don’t *want* to be wrong, but they don’t question everything because that gets exhausting. This is why the likes of Wikipedia and Goodreads are so important; they offer legitimation, so people trust them – which in the case of Goodreads is clearly a bad thing, given their attitude… But if there’s no chance of someone coming across the “The society that divides its scholars from its warriors…” quote on Goodreads, that reduces the frequency of it being miscited, and that’s a net increase (albeit a small one) in the level of intelligence in the world…
Ooh, goodreads have the Charles Ogburn Jr. quote about re-organization under “Petronius” too. Who both knows the name Petronius and would attribute that quote to him?!?
Online scholarly encyclopaedias, like Encyclopedia Iranica or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, are important because they are not subject to “he who has the most time to argue on the internet wins.”
That is hilarious.