So, what was the telling issue of the day today?  The global economic meltdown?  The continuing conflicts in Iraq?  Matters in Israel?  No, apparently how old the Venetian artist Titian was when he died in 1576.

Gordon Brown mentioned the artist in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month

I’m reminded of the story of Titian, who’s the great painter who reached the age of 90, finished the last of his nearly 100 brilliant paintings, and he said at the end of it, ‘I’m finally beginning to learn how to paint,’ and that is where we are.”

Ever alert to the vital issues of the day, the opposition Conservative leader David Cameron, leapt on this statement

The Prime Minister never gets his facts right.  He told us the other day he was like Titian aged 90.  The fact is Titian died at 86

Of course, following that statement, the media rushes off to Wikipedia, the one reliable source of all information on the Internet, to find out the facts.  Once there, they find that according to the page, David Cameron is correct, but the entry has also been recently updated.  Updated that day in fact, to change his date of death to match Cameron’s statement.  And you thought it was only students who did that kind of thing?

It’s gets more interesting though, if you do an RIPE lookup on the address which made the change, where does it go?

inetnum: 194.203.158.96 – 194.203.158.111
netname: CONSCENT02
descr: Conservative Central Office

Oopsie. Rumbled!

Conservative Central office have now owned up blaming an ‘over-eager member of staff‘ but that’s not really the point.  Who cares when Titian died?  The whole thing trivialises the business of politics, but sadly it seems to be reflective of what MPs think matters.  Incidentally, I’m still pointing an accusing finger at the media for relying on Wikipedia again for information rather than doing real research.

As an aside, it is briefly diverting to check what else their ‘over-eager member of staff‘ has seen fit to change on Wikipedia:  (assuming that the IP address was always associated with Conservative Central Office of course)

• They’re keen that we know the Conservative Party is the oldest party in the World, not just in the UK.
• That the collective term for fingerpuppets is a fistful
• ..and for staples it’s a troop
• They really don’t like Jamie Cann’s work in Ipswich
• That orange kinda rhymes with lozenge

and

• That Warthogs smell of poo

Oh, in case you were wondering, no-one seems to know for sure how old Titian was when he died, so the whole thing is anyone’s guess anyway.

In the past, in was relatively hard to get into a position to publish any form of information to the masses, so anything that you read had at least a reasonable chance of being true, barring the biases of the reporter.  However, as this post demonstrates, it’s now very easy to present information to the world giving us generally far too much to process and removing the sort of peer review that you would get from published books in the past.

Tim Burners-Lee has recognised that this could be an issue and believes that we need a mechanism for rating the reliability of pages, but this relies on having a reasonably authoritive source to make those judgements and keep them up to date.  To some extent peer-review can help here, but correct information from one source can easily be overwhelmed by more interesting sounding false information from another.

The problem gets worse when it’s not just people like me skimming pages and not researching them properly, it’s the mainstream media.  Major newspapers in the UK have reported that Ronnie Hazlehurst wrote the song ‘Reach‘ by S-Club 7 before he died, a ‘fact’ cribbed from Wikipedia but not actually true.  More recently, a David Anderson, a reporter for the Daily Mirror, reported from Nicosia that fans of the local football team “are known as the ‘Zany Ones’ and wear hats made from shoes.“, another Wikipedia gem which five minutes of research on the ground would have revealed as false.

Now, neither of these pieces of information are particularly noteworthy in themselves, but when you continually read the same pieces of misinformation, such as the ones I mentioned yesterday for example, presented both on the internet and in the mainstream media, then it gets to be a problem.  We can no longer rely that any facts presented to us have been sensibly researched as we might have done in the past.

That doesn’t mean that we all need to become authorities on everything, just that we need to be wary of information presented to us and think about how likely it is to be true.  Do some background research of your own, visit sites like snopes.com and see if they mention the fact you are interested in (but don’t necessarily assume that they are right either!).  Ask someone who knows about the subject if you can find someone, but don’t just blindly accept things as true, no matter what the source (including me!).

Be a sceptical consumer of information and you stand a better chance of working out what’s actually going on, and you might actually learn something new as well.