Don’t trust the Internet

Kathy Parker
Managing Editor

March 18, 2008 10:51 am

— I should have just rummaged through dozens of old boxes until I found my Chris LeDoux eight tracks. For that matter, I should have known how to spell his name correctly because I listened to those eight tracks constantly while rodeoing and they bounced around my truck all the time. Of course that was a little while ago. Chris won the world as a bareback rider in 1976. I bought my first tape out of the back of his pickup.
So, when I was using a reference to his song about horsepower to set up a bull rider story, I used Google to find the correct spelling. I put in Chris LeDioux. Google asked “did you mean Chris Ledioux?” I figured that was probably what I meant and told Google yes. What I got was 20 pages of stuff including everything from winning the world to his recording career with his name spelled Chris Ledioux. So I figured I was correct, there was an “i” in his last name, and I was incorrect about the capital “D.”
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a workshop where the teacher admonished us to NEVER trust the Internet for research. She said because the Internet has no editors, you may get faulty information.
I’ve learned that lesson the hard way. If you Google Chris LeDoux, of course you get lots of pages of information with the correct spelling. But since nothing in my Google search gave me any indication of the correct spelling, I used the wrong one.
I don’t know how I could have gotten the right answer quickly, but I guess I could’ve called the music counter at Wal-Mart and asked someone to look at a CD. That’s the problem with the news business. People don’t understand that we work on deadlines and sometimes have very little time to check facts. Since we are a very small staff here, without someone whose job it is to do nothing but check facts and spelling, mistakes get through. I was doing my best to get the correct information, but my source was faulty. We may not realize it, but information on the Internet can be posted by anyone and there are no editors. In this case, a lot of people posted things with Chris LeDoux spelled the same way - just wrong. Unfortunately, I asked for information with the same incorrect spelling. So I got incorrect results.
I didn’t know Chris LeDoux personally, just met him a few times at rodeos, but he seemed such a nice guy I think he would forgive me the mistake.
What I learned from this mistake is the Internet is not the best source for research. I should have taken to heart the message from the workshop “don’t trust the Internet.”
I don’t know how long it might take to find those old tapes.