As an ordinary enthusiast there is always a nagging concern that the sources we call up are narrowing. Paul mentions the lack of info on a subject that interests him.  yet I assume there must be many books on that subject. 
Caro  mentions interesting stuff from a book but that is then questioned for lacking substantiated  backing. 

Temps delves into books of scholarship and of a much higher level than I do now and her posts are ever interesting and informative because she discusses them -  or tries to but few here  actually know how to do that properly at her intellectual level.  Proper and genuine discussion on anything anywhere these days is very rare. Defensive stances and attitudes seem to be laid out  like a minefield to prevent it. is there such a thing  - or has there ever been - what is called an Open Mind?

When writing, I did not use one fact dredged from on line research before 2010 and since then  uneasy when I do. Bo longer buying books - our house is already wall lined with so many and I wonder their eventual fate - I tend to browse on line and posts on Res Hist and similar..... but never looking up all the  http ref that posters add which seems to be  a lazy form of contribution; present the facts and argue the case is more useful.

It seems to me that History may well be in crises.

History has always been in a state of chassis, as Bishop Moriarty would have said (look up the source yourself).

Back in the pre-internet days there was a very interesting historiographical study that emanated from Oxbridge, I think some time in the 1960s. The author went to considerable lengths to identify what might be termed "sea changes" in approaches to certain historical subjects over the centuries of academia that had emanated from the institutions with which he was most familiar - namely those perched, as he also most definitely was, on the banks of the Ox and the Cam. It is held up these days as a warning regarding how NOT to interpret historiographical history (other universities do exist), but within the very narrow parameters he had set himself he still managed to come up with one rather irrefutable observation.

Over the course of five or six centuries he identified, in retrospect, a similar number of these fundamental changes of attitude and reinterpretation of past events that were then slavishly followed, mirrored and even plagiarised subsequently in all major historical analysis, at least until the next sea change came along. His initial assumption that this must indicate something deep within the human psyche inextricably linked to passing years ending with "00" however was contradicted by the uneven spacing between these events. Some commonly held biases were sustained for centuries, some for mere decades, and some even came and went within a few short years - shorter even than it takes to get one's first paper published by the Oxford Press.

This puzzled him for ages and he wasted considerable time of his own trying to link these events to actual historical events that might themselves have ushered in these apparent zeitgeists with such erratic life spans, an endeavour in which he also unfortunately and rather depressingly came as equal a cropper as before. Until, that is, he started looking closely at the bibliographical data contained in the indices of many of the works he was examining. Lo and behold (as Abraham might have said - look up the source yourself), but his "Doh!" moment (look up the source - it's rather older than you might imagine, Simpsons fans) came when he realised that each of these radical reinterpretations of history which subsequently gained currency as the new academic norm coincided exactly with large bequests of entire libraries by rich old dead duffers to Oxbridge academia at five or six crucial points along the way. The sheer novelty of the new "sources" for historians obviously thoroughly jaded from competing on stale battlefields, it appears, was enough to kick-start completely new historiographical trajectories each time, and because of their point of origin within such exalted halls of academia gained traction worldwide.

The crisis then, of course, was merely risking a failure to distinguish between history whose attraction lay primarily in the novelty of its source from that which could be said to be academically sound and based on much previous application of critical thought. The crisis these days unfortunately, thanks to the internet and the many ways in which it satisfies this base craving for novelty over substance from which our historical historians were at least protected by sheer lack of opportunity to satiate their urge, is that we no longer have to wait for rich old duffers to bequeath their libraries. Instead, in this great "university of life" in which we have all been electronically and involuntarily enrolled, we can classify as "historical source" not only these editorially sturdy, if biased, anthologies of times past, but also just about anything emanating from anybody who can commit via a keyboard any semblance of recorded activity (however imaginatively concocted this may be) with much the same aforethought and skill with which they may also leave a mark of equal historical merit on their toilet paper. One might think it should not take much by way of critical faculty for most people to distinguish used loo paper from a Homeric text. The arrival of the internet however has brought with it a rather depressing realisation in that regard which even our poor historiographer above, depressed as he already was at the shallowness he had discovered among historians, would still not have imagined in his worst nightmare.

I listened to a talk (online sorry) where the writer of a popular series of murder mysteries with a historical setting mentioned that he no longer relied solely on the internet to find out background material for his novels as he had done so once and made an error.

I've found archive.org quite useful especially during the Covid-19 quarantine.  That hasn't been entirely in order to find historical sources though, I looked at the novel Tom Jones online recently.  I slogged my way through a translation of Einhard's book about Charlemagne on archive.org (though I had to have recourse to this board for the meaning of one word).  I have been grateful to contributors of this board for directing me to online versions of medieval works, for example of Froissart's Chronicles.  If I've linked an online blog or video (or any other online medium) it's often because I don't want to breach a copyright or because I thought the original researcher explained matters more eloquently than I could.  I've listened to podcasts (often recordings made of public lectures) which came from the RSA, The National Archives and Liverpool University* (though not recently).  Admittedly, that's been for my own interest I have used these resources and not because I've intended to write a book.  A real life acquaintance cautioned me to be wary of using Wikipedia as a source because it is in a constant state of flux.

*I'm mentioning these resources as examples of how I have found online sites to be useful and not because I want to sway this thread in any direction.

nordmann, did Bishop Moriarty also tell a lay person how to distinguish a bogus source from an authentic one?

No, but he certainly impressed on poor Jack that the world was in a state of "chassis". Unfortunately for him this realisation came too late, the month of June had just ended.

The crux of the matter regarding internet-sourced material is the huge requirement, beyond the capability of many, to critically assess its content and function. That requirement exists with traditional printed material too, of course, though even the dumbest of us tend to be able to assess the context and manner of presentation in a way that at least indicates what we are likely to find when we assess its contents. We are not universally as well educated yet, unfortunately, to apply this same critical faculty to internet-sourced data. Or at least so the evidence would suggest.

The other main difference is between how we cite source data emanating from each medium. We expect citation of printed reference to indicate not only the publication but the exact location within this where the relevant referenced data can be found. Temp, and Caro, also at times even go to considerable effort here to save us the job of undertaking such an onerous task by helpfully transcribing verbatim the relevant passages. This is courtesy beyond the call of duty and much appreciated, as are often similar footnotes presenting quotations relevantly and cogently in printed books.

Compare that to a similar exercise conducted using electronically sourced data, and I would classify Paul here as the worst offender by an absolute mile. The default approach is to publish an electronic link, not to the relevant passage or reference, but to the entire publication - something that would be considered crass and lazy if a serious author applied the same method in printed format. Worse, where this approach is foregone in favour of a "cut&paste" extract from an electronic page elsewhere, the laziness extends to cutting and pasting not only the body text but all the metadata, embedded html links, and even some extremely dodgy embedded scripts at times - simply because the person does not actually understand fully the medium in which they are operating. Paul tops the offenders list unfortunately, not just because he does all this, but does it several times even within one post!

A good source is one to which you can refer with some authority and with more than a little confidence that it is also authoritative in its own right. It is a privilege to be able to do so, and a simple acknowledgement of this privilege is to present it therefore in a courteous and concise manner and neither hit the reader over the head with it nor send the reader insane trying to untangle its content when they have painstakingly followed your lead to that source. Or at least that is what we used to be taught back in the day when these little things actually mattered.

Way out of my league, in the heady world of logic what happens next in the 'Attitude' thread? In this case a book was cited.

Interesting  input that collided with another opinion, perhaps, was presented from an author whose provenance  and references was held up to the light and questioned. The author of the source book have now been shown to be reasonably sound and academically acceptable. (Especially when matched against anyone else on this site,-so what now in debate?  Logically speaking, that is. 

Ah yes, and PS 
As noted, I looked up 'Lo and Behold' but I found no Abraham who might have said that as suggested - apart from  one Abraham-Hicks who seems to write pure woo- woo, so perhaps you are into that now normann. 'Might have said' seems a tad wooly  a reference.