Internet: To trust or not to trust

Are we entering an age of digital ignorance or would we rather trust a bunch of random strangers over the government's own advice?

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The number of internet searches for the term "swine flu" increased 58 fold over the past week, according to net marketing experts Hitwise.

However, the top page out of the more than 18 million websites that are offered up on the subject by Google is the Wikipedia entry on swine influenza.

Wikipedia is one of the biggest breakthroughs of the digital age. It has articles on everything and everyone and can be edited by absolutely anyone.

But is this really where we should be going for medical advice and support in the face of a possible pandemic? Personally I think this whole thing has been over-hyped. After all we didn't all die of bird flu, Sars, mad cow disease or rabies did we?

Nonetheless it gives me cause for concern that the only way to see the Government's own advice on swine flu at the top of the list is to specifically limit the search to pages from the UK.

So I'm left wondering if, at a time when the country is in the grips of recession and the only offer I can get on my house is a chocolate milkshake and £5 book token, we have actually taken to relying on the faceless hoards of the interweb over our political leaders.

Wikipedia's entry certainly looks impressive. It's written in plain, simple English alongside massive amounts of scientific detail. It has links to other pages and plenty of cold, hard fact.

And that's all well and good as long as some overly melodramatic, but possibly well meaning, net user has not decided to try to turn it into a movie script.

Looking at the "talk" section some poor soul has been pulling his hair out and called for a "severe clean up" after he found references to the virus "tearing off" on a "pandemic sweep". Fortunately that clean-up seems to have happened as the page is being constantly fixed by people who know better.

Further looks at the discussions reveal actual, real biochemists are among the ones updating this page.

Suddenly I find myself starting to trust it. If there are real, knowledgeable, experts sharing their knowledge with us for free then that's got to be a good thing.

And perhaps in the long run it's actually more reliable than the advice of a bunch of politicians in suits, the same people who kept spending while the sub-prime mortgage crisis was brewing, who just keep telling us to stay calm.

Wikipedia's popularity just goes to show that you can throw millions of pounds at an all singing, all dancing taxpayer-funded website but you can't beat a bit of good, honest and free advice from the people in the know. And that's fantastic. We are, none of us, alone now that we have access to each other's minds and knowledge in one glorious repository of education.

Its information must be treated with caution though, as it only takes one joker with a laptop to claim that "swine flu" means pigs that took flight. Swine flew. Get it? Thank you. I'm here all week.