The Mis-Information Super Highway

The purpose of this page is to encourage better research into the things people put onto their web pages as facts. It is not to say that the internet is the sole outlet for misinformation and extremist views. A number of errors in pages that this page lists also appeared in high circulation print media.

The bottom line is don't believe everything you see or hear, be it on television, in newspapers and especially not on the world wide web. If you know of any URL's that contain misinformation please mail me.

Just Plain Wrong

If ever you needed a reason not to do school assignments from the web here are a few pages containing factual errors.

How to emmigrate to Australia Travellers digest, already suffering in the credibility stakes from lack of an apostrophe in their corporate name, claim that Captain Cook discovered Australia. Australia had first been sighted well over one hundred years previously. Cook merely mapped the East Coast.
Wall painting goes one better. Not only does it claim that Captain Cook discovered Australia, it also claims that white settlement of Australia wiped out the dodo (a Mauritian bird hunted to extinction by Europeans) and the moa (a flightless New Zealand bird hunted to extinction by the native Maoris).

Hate Pages

These pages not only display a despicable lack of humanity, they are also clearly wrong or deliberately misleading in some way.

White Aryan Resistance. The American who wrote "there is no other country for myself or my fellow whites to go to, so naturally instincts dictate that this is ours." in the Our Racial Hatred article has obviously never heard of Western Europe. Other articles are similarly poorly informed, claiming that yellow man could never never have thought of the idea to fly ("kite battles" happened long before the hot air balloon), interbreeding causes more ape like brains and misunderstand the meaning of the word Aryan (Indo-European).
God Hates Fags is a nasty piece of self-confessed hatred which uses to support its contention that God hates homosexuals the quote "God shall not lay with mankind as with womankind, it is an abomination" (Lev 18:22) and the treatment of the sodomites by God, both of which would seem to be compelling. What it fails to point out is that the quotation is not as clear in meaning as it seems and that the Sodomites were also idolators and rapists, both of which are clearly greater sins in the eyes of God.
Stonewall revisited deliberately sets itself up to look like a pro-Lesbian and Gay page, but every link talks about how these people "can" cure themselves of their homosexuality.

The Darwin Awards

The theory behind the Darwin Awards is that it goes to the person who does the greatest service to evolution by removing their genes from the gene pool. As far as I can ascertain the Darwin Awards started off with the dubious story of a man who attached a JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) Rocket to his car. While an entertaining story it is widely believed to be untrue. Although the JATO rocket incident was reported in several newspapers, they got their information from the internet too.

Another famous winner was a person who attached weather balloons to his deckchair. Again this is an amusing story, but in theory he should not be elligible as he survived and can still breed. Here are a few examples of pages claiming to list the winners of this fictitious accolade.

Darwin Awards Official Home Page I'm not sure why it calls itself official, but it points out a few urban legends.
Darwin Awards This guy cites sources for his later stories, but can't convert from miles to kilometers.
Darwin Awards This guy can't convert from kilometers to miles either. At least we know they both used the same source.
Darwin Awards The guy with the JATO is now an air force sergeant.
The Darwin Awards The JATO car is a 1967 Impala.
1996 Darwin Awards Oops, it's a 1964 Impala.
The Darwin Awards Not only did the person writing the insurance form not remove himself from the gene pool, but the story is at least thirty years old.
Darwin Awards (for appropriate deaths and injuries) It just goes to show that even if a site shows its sources it can still be questioned. I stumbled across an debunking that examines the Pillsbury Dough Boy Wanted for Attempted Murder story.

Too weird for me

This is for pages that are either by people who have no grip on reality, or are making a joke that is too obscure for me.

Time Cube It seems to me that this person was brainwashed into seeing everything in terms of right angles as a child. Odd.

I want to believe

Sometimes sites are written by people so that they can reveal the truth to the masses. Of course sometimes people's idea of the truth and the way the world acutally work do not always converge.

UFO Researcher. I'd be remiss if I didn't include at least one UFO page.
Druidic Lessons. Learn the eerie secrets of Astral Travel.

Pages doing my job

There are a lot of other pages out there determined to point out misinformation on the web.

Dead Mariner Discovers Vancouver Island Catalogues misinformation about Sir Francis Drake on the web.
Don't Spread that Hoax! A nice list of online hoaxes.
Dave's Web of Lies isn't really the same sort of thing, but I liked it anyway.