Double and triple check the info on the Web

Bookkeepers use the time-honoured double entry system to make sure they didn’t enter wrong figures. Patients often consult more than one physician when they doubt the diagnostic made by a first one, taking what is called a second opinion.

Most software applications require you to enter twice a new password you are just creating, so as to verify it. Examples abound of such precautionary behaviour meant to cater for otherwise perfectly understandable human errors, or deception sometimes. Multiple verification, double or even triple, often is the only way to ensure you don’t end up with wrong numbers or information — especially information.

With the above in mind, and with the kind of information you find on the Web, which by now have become absolutely overwhelming in volume and also in diversity, multiple verification has become a must if you want to believe what you are reading or seeing on the Web. And yes, this includes news channels, Wikipedia and any source for that matter, however trustable it may appear at first sight.

Unless the information is unimportant, is trivial, or does not really matter to you, beware of immediately believing what you are reading or watching.

From honest mistakes, to misleading news, poorly written articles and to deceptive photos or videos, manipulated with digital wizardry, the reasons are many why you can’t believe everything without multiple checking.

It has become a habit to me, whenever I see information on the Web, to think, more or less instinctively, “well, yes, maybe it is true, and maybe it’s not”, and then to move on to a next subject or website. However, when the information matters to me, when I intend to use it or to act based on it, I tend to verify it by cross checking it on other sites, or by searching other sources, still on the Web of course.

The less trustworthy is the first source I come upon and the more intensive cross-checking I do. If I don’t end up with solid, very much convincing verification, I usually reject the infomation as being unreliable and I don’t use it or act at all. In a way, in my book of rules and in this specific context, they all are guilty until proven innocent.

Even automatic translation such as Google Translate, that we all use every now and then, is for me subject to suspicion. A common method I use in such-case is the reverse translation. Say I am trying to translate a sentence from English to Spanish. Once I get the Spanish sentence I copy and paste it again in the original window, translating it again to English to see if there’s no discrepancy the other way round. I sometimes get crazy results. If both ways match then I accept it. Moreover, if the subject of my sentence is critical to me, I take it again to other translation sites or online dictionaries for more validation.

Wikipedia and Web news channels, more particularly, are to be taken with extreme precaution. Though I admit that I frequently use Wikipedia to find information, I am very careful as to how to use it.

The freedom on the Web and the magnitude, the scale of things found there is such that it has become a double-edged sword. It can be an efficient weapon if handled carefully and wisely, or a terrible one if misused, abused or trusted blindly.

Multiple verification and cross-checking is tedious and long. I don’t particularly enjoy doing it on the Web; no one does I suppose. It is, however, the only way I know of if I want to believe what I see there. Again, this attitude makes sense only for information that matters to you and that you may use, re-use or act upon.