Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Issues with Quotes
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A quote with multiple issues
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Mod
Long since lost track of this. Any chance a super could at least tag it as "misattributed"?
Do quotes have to be from authors? I would edit it so it was attributed to the right person, personally; however, I don't know what the procedure is.
Over 500 people have liked it so it would need a super to re attribute if possible to do
Mod
In cases where I know and can prove that the quote is misattributed, but where it cannot be fixed here (like because the real source is not an author), I generally just put "misattributed" in the tag field, and sometimes the source name when known and likewise reasonably provable. I just can do that with this one because at this point only a super can edit it at all, even just in the tags.As examples, here's one with the real source's name in the tags:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/...
One with no proper source:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/...
And one I moved to the real source, and tagged with the original misattribution (apparently before it got locked out):
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/...
The maxim that "famous words need famous mouths" makes our quote database, like all the other crowd-sourced quote databases, rather corrupt, sadly. Fixing what I can find is one of my Sisyphean pet projects.
Currently attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt with 170+ votes, but more correctly attributable to Van Buren Hoover, who is not in the database, even under his pen name Martin Vanbee, because he was a magazine editor, not a book writer. But as "famous quotes need famous mouths," it is much more often attributed to Roosevelt uncited.
So, do we delete it because it's NAB? Or reattribute to the correct author? If so, under which name?