What are reliable YouTube sources?

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Snowygrouch said:
A bigger problem isn't the stupid videos, its the ones which are NEARLY very good which are dangerous, as people who are not top experts can come away thinking
they`re watching a serious scholar.
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I have watched in the last two days authentic never before seen gun camera footage of Spitfires and Hurricanes from the BoB that clearly shows an FW190 being attacked, another video today that was from a cannon armed Spitfire yet again the plane being attacked was unmistakably a P51 Mustang.
 
For all the aviation content I consume, I don't watch a lot Youtube videos on the stuff. I get a lot of recommendations, but I find myself shutting a lot of them off rather quickly, in order to prevent myself from reacting with violence.

On SnowyGrouch's point on archive divers, there are plentiful recommendations I can make in other military-industrial fields.

Armoured Archives - Hasn't updated in about six months, but makes fascinating videos on (primarily) British armour of WW2 and the immediate post-war period backed up by a lot of original research.

Tank museum - Great spot for the history of armoured vehicles. Usually presented by actual historians and curators at the Bovington tank museum. Main criticism is that sometimes they keep their explanations a little too generalised to better cater to non-specalist audiences.

Drachinifel - Naval history concentrating specifically on different ships (WW1 & WW2 mostly), as well as battles and different aspects of naval technology. Not as much obvious primary source referencing, but also appears to be VERY well read when it comes to secondary literature.


If there's anyone like the above for WW2 aircraft, I'd be all eyes and ears for it.
 
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Jabberwocky said:
For all the aviation content I consume, I don't watch a lot Youtube videos on the stuff. I get a lot of recommendations, but I find myself shutting a lot of the off rather quickly, in order to prevent myself from reacting with violence.

On SnowyGrouch's point on archive divers, there are plentiful recommendations I can make in other military-industrial fields.

Armoured Archives - Hasn't updated in about six months, but makes fascinating videos on (primarily) British armour of WW2 and the immediate post-war period backed up by a lot of original research.

Tank museum - Great spot for the history of armoured vehicles. Usually presented by actual historians and curators at the Bovington tank museum. Main criticism is that sometimes they keep their explanations a little too generalised to better cater to non-specalist audiences.

Drachinifel - Naval history concentrating specifically on different ships (WW1 & WW2 mostly), as well as battles and different aspects of naval technology. Not as much primary source referencing, but also appears to be VERY well read when it comes to secondary literature.


If there's anyone like the above for WW2 aircraft, I'd be all eyes and ears for it.
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I'm a big fan of "Drach".
 
SaparotRob said:
As a rule of thumbnail, if the description has exclamation points or states everything you know is wrong, it's probably clickbait.
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Also, avoid anything that utilizes text to speech. If it's worth posting it's worth narrating yourself. If only YouTube had a filter to block TTS, instead they encourage it!

speechify.com

Is text to speech allowed on YouTube? | Speechify

Is text to speech allowed on YouTube? It is but there are restrictions. Here’s a complete guide to using TTS on YouTube without breaking any rules.
speechify.com speechify.com
 
If you're interested in the Pacific theater, I can recommend the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum YouTube channel.

They're not on YouTube—I think they should be—but just to alert people to them, if you're interested in the South and SW Pacific theaters, PacificWrecks.com and OzatWar.com are two excellent sites that I use frequently in my own research. They rely heavily on primary sources like both American and Japanese records (group/squadron/personnel), personal interviews/diaries/flight logs, photographs, etc., and on authorities who rely on the same, i.e. Steve Birdsall, Richard Dunn, Bob Rocker, Michael Clairingbould, Larry Hickey/IHRA, Ed Rogers, etc.

Sometimes it's hard to judge YouTube channels on their accuracy. For the most part they're just the messengers. Without having done original research themselves, it can be hard for well-intentioned channels to know when they're passing along bad information. Sure, it can be easy to tell when they're exaggerating for effect, and \sometimes you can vet a source with just a little digging. But other times it's not nearly that cut-and-dried.

Case in point: my wheelhouse is Jay Zeamer's Eager Beavers and the backdrop for their story, the bomber war in the SW Pacific theater from Pearl Harbor through mid-1943. I know based on my thirty years spent researching all that LUCKY 666, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin's book about them, is to a considerable degree a well-intentioned (mostly, I think) mess. But Drury and Clavin are best-selling NYT authors with a bevy of well-reviewed books to their names, so why would a YouTube channel—most recently The Fat Electrician, which clearly relied extensively on the book—necessarily doubt the scholarship behind it? After all, it's got an impressive-looking bibliography. If you know what to look for, you can see what crucial sources are left out (which made a huge difference), but again, that's not most readers, or YouTube creators.

Of course the Eager Beavers story has suffered from bad information and hyperbole dating back to just months after the mission that made them historic, so most everything since, online and off, YouTube and otherwise, has suffered from that. As with politics and most everything else, it can make it awfully hard not just to know who to trust, but how even to find out.
 
Admiral Beez said:
Also, avoid anything that utilizes text to speech. If it's worth posting it's worth narrating yourself. If only YouTube had a filter to block TTS, instead they encourage it!

speechify.com

Is text to speech allowed on YouTube? | Speechify

Is text to speech allowed on YouTube? It is but there are restrictions. Here’s a complete guide to using TTS on YouTube without breaking any rules.
speechify.com speechify.com
Click to expand...

Fun fact: Drachinifel used a text-to-speech voice in his videos before deciding, after a vote from his viewers, to switch to using his real voice.
 
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