I read an interview with Clint Eastwood the other day in The New York Times. A great interview with a great man, and a great paper, but all three were tarnished by one line.

The interviewer, presumably, asks Clint to confirm that he’s a vegan. Turns out he’s not. Apparently the writer did his research on Wikipedia because that’s what he cites as a source:

“Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia,” he writes, “Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is”.

“I never look at the Internet for just that reason,” he said.

Ouch. The New York Times takes a swipe at Wikipedia and Clint comes across as stuck in the era of spaghetti westerns.

And the journalist? Well, I'm not one to diss a colleague, but the point he scores is a cheap one, and I'd counsel anyone against relying on Wikipedia for researching an interview with a guy who can spit tobacco across a parking lot.

The problem, you see, is not Wikipedia, but the people who read it.

Wikipedia's rules are pretty simple, and the simplest of all is that everything that appears on Wikipedia should be sourced. So anything you read on Wikipedia must have appeared somewhere else first.

You can see this from the numbers in square brackets after a sentence. Click on one and you're taken to the bottom of the page and a link to the original source, or to a reference if it's a printed source.

(Not all Wikipedia entries are well-sourced, and those that aren't carry big notices at the top warning readers.)

So what of the Clint-as-vegan thing? Where did that appear? A glance at Clint's Wikipedia page would reveal the source for this "fact" about Clint is, in fact, a fellow old media source, The Los Angeles Times.

In fact, you won't be able to see this on the Wikipedia page anymore because it's been removed. That's because some new media moves faster than old media: on the day the NYT piece was first published, a Wikipedian spotted the reference and prompted an internal discussion.

The reference was then removed on the grounds that a direct denial from Eastwood trumps an LA Times piece.

This is good. The whole discussion is there if people want to see it, along with earlier versions of the entry. Wikipedia leaves a long, long trail.

Not that the idea couldn't be improved. People who use Wikipedia a lot are hip to the fact that it's uneven: Only fools would rely on what it says without checking the facts elsewhere. But it's a great place to start on a subject, to get up to speed quickly.

But I don't like to see it dissed by those who don't understand it.

The sad truth is the Internet is a hard place to nail down the truth, and I am not sure those of us in the old traditional media do a good job of sifting myth from fact.

Back to the Clint example: The LA Times piece itself -- the source of the Wikipedia reference -- doesn't cite a source. But there are plenty of them around on the web. Clint is quoted on dozens of sites as saying "I try to stick to a vegan diet-heavy on fruit, vegetables, tofu, and other soy products."

So much so that pro-vegetarian sites like GoVeg.com have been happy to include him in their list of animal-friendly celebrities (although, to their credit, they seem to have removed him after this recent ruckus.)

And try as I might I can't find the source of that particular quote. But there's no doubt it's been around for a while: a forum cites it in September 2006. The oldest reference I can find is in the Miami New Times, a free weekly newspaper, on Oct. 13, 2005, which lists Clint among a number of (supposed) vegans.

In short, the Clint-as-vegan myth has been circulating in old and new media for more than three years. Clint, who disavows the Internet, isn't likely to correct the online version, but I'm kinda surprised that he hadn't come across the allegation if it had been bouncing around online and off for three years.

So what's the lesson from all this? Well, there are a few. Clint needs to buy a computer and hire a better publicist. Us journalists should do better research and stop blaming Wikipedia.

And Wikipedia needs to educate its users better about what it is and what it isn't. It's not an encyclopedia; a crowd-sourced collation of what we know, or think we know, about a subject.

And us? Well, we need to be skeptical about anything we read, online and offline.

I'm sure the publication you're reading right now is a paragon of fact-checking and probity. But the Clint Vegan Episode is a good reminder that there's no fact so small that it can't stand a little fact-checking.

Happy holidays.

@ Copyright

Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

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