A site called Gullible.info that serves up fake trivia recently saw one of its invented factoids end up in a story in the Guardian. Here’s the original June 2005 post from Gullible.info:
LSD guru Timothy Leary claimed to have discovered an extra primary color he referred to as “gendale.”
From there it made its way into a Wikipedia bio of Leary (it has since been removed) and then in April 2006 it showed up in this Guardian article:
He exhorted America to “turn on, tune in and drop out” and claimed to have discovered a new primary colour – which he called gendale. Now Timothy Leary, the eccentric spokesman of the 1960s counter-culture, is to become the subject of a Hollywood movie.
As noted by one of the Gullible.info creators on his blog, the Guardian still hasn’t corrected its article. (His post was linked by a post on Kottke.org, which a reader sent to us.) In his original post about the Guardian error, Kyle Stoneman of Gullible.info made some interesting points:
…I’ve said it for years: the nature of information is changing. The people who don’t fundamentally alter the ways in which they interface with information will find themselves misled. Not just by Gullible.info, but in more serious ways by sites like MartinLutherKing.org — a white supremacist group’s website.
The safe thing to do is assume that any information you find online isn’t necessarily wrong, but assume that it isn’t very valuable. What
does that mean? Basically it means that you shouldn’t use it to make any decisions that could 1) cost you money, 2) damage your health, 3) etc, etc. It could be impeccably accurate, it could be completely off the mark, or it could be somewhere between those points. But the key thing is that you have no way of knowing for sure where on that spectrum it falls.
People are busy. And we need to have information that we can trust.
That’s why we pay for things. We pay for newspapers, we pay for news organizations. We pay these people to verify information for us. We pay them to make sure that it’s correct. Of course just because we pay for something doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily true, but for the most part, it’s a safe assumption to make that it’s probably more true than false. That is to say, on our spectrum, the information they tell us is going to fall more towards the true side…
So, let’s see how long it takes the Guardian to correct its story.
