It is revealed that the 456 abuses the chemicals in children as a type of drug and that the whole operation is basically drug trade. While the government prepares the children, Frobisher places Jack into custody while Gwen and Rhys are escorted back to Cardiff to inform Ianto’s sister of his death. Lois is also under arrest for espionage. The prime minister informs the country that all children can go back to school and some will have an inoculation against the sinister effects of the 456 (including staring into space and speaking in unison); just a ruse, as these selected children will in fact be handed to the 456 “as a gift”. Then the 456 began charging its lazor, the sun began to shine and Captain Jack did the dance to “thriller”… it was a grand day.

I bet that doesn’t stay like that for  long.  One of the good things about Wikipedia is that it is ‘ self-healing’ and peer review/wisdom of the crowd/whatever you want to call it does fix mistakes or just plain vandalism, although it is also quite entertaining to read some of the vandalism before it gets fixed.

Or maybe Captain Jack did actually do the dance from Thriller and I missed it.

Punk rock (often referred to simply as punk) is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Bahrain, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock.

Bahrain??  I’ve taken that out – I’m pretty sure that there was not a thriving punk scene in Bahrain in the 1970′s.

Upon theatrical release, the film was banned in Ireland. Only four films have been banned in Ireland, and three of them (Life of Brian (1979), The Meaning of Life (1983), and this film) have been directed by Terry Jones.

I thought it was amazing that a country would ban four films, and three of them all by the same director. I wondered what the 4th film was and looked at Wikipedia’s entry on censorship in the Republic of Ireland, where it says:

However, many movies have been banned in Ireland in the past, including Life Of Brian, Disney’s Fantasia and A Clockwork Orange. A review in 2000 has meant that many of these have since been un-banned and rated anywhere from PG to 18. During that review process it was decided that no more films would be banned for either theatre or video release, but some bans are still in place.

The Film Censors Office’s official figures state that 2,500 films received theatrical performance bans, and over 11,000 films were cut, mainly pre-1965.

A check at the Irish film censors office reveals that Wikipedia is right and IMDb couldn’t be more wrong, which is a shame because it would have made a brilliant pub quiz question.

Of course, the issue of how many films have been banned in a foreign country is relatively trivial but it does go to show that you can’t always trust everything just because its on the Internet. You would expect a fair amount of rubbish, mistakes or even lies on blogs and message boards, but even ‘proper’ sites like IMDb are not infallible.

Ironically it was Wikipedia, which has come in for a lot of criticism over its reliability, that was correct in this case.

Its something to bear in mind if you are relying on the Internet for research or for homework, but there is no need to panic: just make do a sanity check on facts wherever possible. In the particular case of Wikipedia, it nearly always has links to source material and its a good idea to follow a few of those to corroborate things.

The few funny entries which remain have been flagged as lacking in some way. Even the brilliant entry on soup which reads:

A food created by boiling one or more ingredients in water, stock or broth. Unless it’s gazpacho.

It has also increased to a massive 7,000 articles. Only another 1,722,000 to go and it will catch up with Wikipedia!

There is a more significant consequence of all this than just removing a source of ridicule for us liberals (as we would be called by them) and that is that there must be an increased chance of the whole thing being taken seriously.

With that sort of volume of spamming I have had to make the spam filters quite strict so there is a little more chance of getting false positives, and less chance of me spotting them – there is no way I am going through 1200 comments just in case! If anyone leaves a comment which doesn’t appear, let me know and I’ll look into it.

A lot of the spamming now seems to come from Japan-based sites running wiki-type software. The sites look genuine as far as I can tell, and I think they are mostly academic sites: there must be a fad in for academics to run wikis or pukiwikis. What is happening seems to be that these wikis allow anyone to upload content, in the original spirit of the Internet, and some less savoury types are abusing that by uploading scripts which generate all this spam.

I had seen all the publicity about the Ricky Gervais podcasts but only this week did I actually download the ones which are currently on the Guardian website. I put them onto the iRiver so I could listen to them on the way to work and found them to be very entertaining.

I wouldn’t mind catching up on the old ones, and would be quite prepared to pay the fairly small amount they cost but they are only available in a couple of DRM-protected versions. On Audible you get them in the proprietary Audible .aa format which very few players support – certainly not my 3-year-old machine.

The other option is iTunes but I really do not want to install that bloody software on my computer again – and the iRiver doesn’t play Apple AAC files anyway. I would quite happily pay for an mp3 or unprotected wma, but we are not trusted with them. I guess I will have to buy the CDs one day. In the meantime I will have to make the most of the current free podcasts which are plain mp3 files. The next one is due out at Christmas – at least I now have a reason to look forward to Christmas this year. (Bah humbug!)

Anyway, I still can’t make my mind up about Karl Pilkington. Some people think he is a fictional character played by an actor, in which case he would have to be a genius at improvisation, either that or the whole thing is superbly written and realistically acted – and we know how well Gervais achieved the realistic effect in The Office. If he is real then he must have unlimited patience to put up with his treatment by the others.

Whatever the truth, he seems to be a bit of a cult figure so it comes as no surprise to find that there is a website devoted to him. Several. The best has to be the Pilkipedia – an entire wiki just about Karl Pilkington. OK, its actually about him, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant but its named after him.

Reading through that site and the official Ricky Gervaise site you start to realise what a media empire Gervaise has managed to build up what with the Ofice and Extras TV shows, DVDs and script books, the CDs of XFM radio shows and podcasts, the Flanimals books, the stand-up shows and everything. I can’t complain about it though. The Flanimals thing does nothing for me, but the rest of it all is right up my street.

Now I know that the Fastway bus service in Crawley has its critics, leading to the local nickname of ‘Farceway’ but I thought that was a purely local phenomenon. Or maybe they were just looking for these people instead?

The strange thing is that I tried that Google search myself, and this site is only about the 8th or 9th on the list. Way higher is the Wikipedia entry on Fastway, which I had a quick look at. I was quite disappointed by it. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the system, the Wikipedia entry is possibly the least neutral I have ever come across. (I haven’t looked at the really contentious ones like ‘Tony Blair’ or ‘George Bush’)

I had a look at the discussions for the entry and amazingly it used to be even worse. Apparently the entry used to start like this:

Crawley Fastway is a controversial project to provide a new guided bus service linking some areas of Crawley in southern England with the nearby Gatwick Airport. The project has required the destruction of large sections of the existing road infrastructure, and has run into heavy local opposition.

I suppose it is an indication of the merits of the whole idea of Widipedia that this has since been toned down, but I think the article is still a long way from being neutral. Some of the external links on it, and sources of quotes are: a local bulletin board, a couple of local bloggers and a Lib Dem newsletter, all of which have a known anti-Fastway bias. Its one to keep an eye on I think. It demonstrates the pitfalls of the Wiki system, but lets hope it eventually comes to prove the benefits of decent moderation.

Regardless of my own opinions on Fastway (Good idea. Nice buses. Terribly fragile shelters. Bad project implementation and appalling control and reporting of costs, but hopefully the service will be running long after the memories of that mismanagement have faded.) its a shame that the integrity of the whole Wikipedia project is being undermined for the sake of some local point-scoring.