There's a lot of what's called "misattribution" going around.

Did Albert Einstein make the following observation (or one like it)?

...if bees were to disappear, man would only have a few years to live...

Which means no one can find the quote anywhere. Although it has been attributed to Einstein, there is no proof Einstein ever said it.

Who should bear the burden in cases like this?

Bill Maher? Just last week he said Einstein said it, as do thousands of websites.

This argument has reached Wikipedia. The cached version shows the Einstein quote, and gives as sources Der Spiigel and Freie Universitat Berlin.

Cached or not, the quote has now disappeared entirely from the official Wikipedia Bee entry.

But on Wikipedia's "End of Civilization" entry, Einstein is still officially quoted as saying the following:

"If the bees should die, humankind would have but four more years to live."

What gives? There's a discussion about the removal of the Einstein bee quote, but I guess removal in one place does not guarantee removal in another.

Is it the rule that if a quote is found to be misattributed, it should be removed? Or should the quote stay in under a separate heading?

A quote about fear of weapons which has been misattributed to Sigmund Freud has nonetheless remained, in two different Wiki entries -- the Freud biography as well as the WikiQuote entry on guns. However, it now appears under the large and unmistakable heading of "Misattributed."

I was going to go look up the Freud quote for myself, but I no longer need to, as Glenn Reynolds has already done it:

I went to the library to look the Freud reference up myself. The quote above doesn't appear on p. 33 as cited. Instead, there is what's seen below, which appears right after an account of a dream in which a woman tries to unsheathe a dagger to kill herself, only to awaken and find she's tugging on her husband's penis....

[...]

This is consistent with the (currrent) WikiQuote version, saying that the Freud quote is actually quoting Kates' commentary on what Freud might think, rather than what Freud actually said.

Now, you could argue that the "Misattributed" category belongs only in a biography, but the misattributed Freud quote appears both in the Freud biography and in Wiki's gun entry.

Can anyone help?

Considering that no one believes anyone (thus Glenn Reynolds saw the need to take a photo of the misattributed Freud quote), I figured should take a screenshot of what's no longer there in Wiki.

Here's the now vanished Einstein bee quote:

I really wouldn't mind the removal of misattributed quotes, nor would I mind leaving the quote in under the heading of "Misattributed." However I must object to a selective "now you see it, now you don't" approach, because it implies that misattributed quotes about guns are more important (or would that be more worthy of opprobrium?) than misattributed quotes about bees -- even when the latter involve the views of Albert Einstein about the end of mankind.

Or am I missing something? Is Einstein perhaps less important than Freud? Or is the alleged end of mankind a less important topic than an alleged neurosis about weapons?

UPDATE (04/27/07): Adam Rosen, Editor of Gelf Magazine has emailed me to point out that there's not only no proof that Einstein ever made the bee remark, but the curator of his archives says there's not even one reference to bees in any of his writings:

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about this oft-quoted line is that Einstein probably never said it. Roni Grosz, curator of the Albert Einstein Archives of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, tells Gelf, "There is no proof of Einstein ever having said or written it." While Grosz notes that it is extremely difficult to disprove a quote, he "could not remember even one reference to bees in Einstein's writings."