When did that happen?

As a content creator online, whenever I am writing it is often necessary to conduct research on the topics I choose to write about.  While many of my pieces are opinion based and as such don't need a great deal of research, there are moments when you do have to check claims that you make.  When blogging in particular there is always an expectation that what you write is opinion rather than fact, but for me personally when I cover things such as politics or psychology, and to a lesser extent music, I like to know a bit of background information on the topics I write about, none least of all issues surrounding the LGBT community.

As a web developer, and as someone who has designed and built content management systems [CMS], I often find reliability to be a considerable problem online.  It is most often the features that are most useful provided by a CMS that are misused.  To give an example, one of the key pieces of information I look for when conducting online research is the date of publication.  This is something that is remarkably hard to determine.  Now I realise many people will scroll to the bottom of this blog post and see the date and time it was posted and say that wasn't so hard, but the problem is that data is not reliable.  Many CMS, this one included, allows the author to set the date and time of publication on any article they write.  That value can be set to anything really, which can be useful but it can also be misused and often is.  If you were to look through the archive of posts on this blog you'd be forgiven for thinking it was created in 2011 because that's how far the archive goes back at present.  This blog was actually created in November of 2015.  All posts prior to that date are posts that have been imported from another blog which I have since deleted.

The point is that it is possible to backdate an article and post it through a CMS and it will appear as if it was published on the date that was set.  This fact makes it hard to determine when a page was actually created when you try to conduct research online.  Posts which claim to make predictions or projections about future events can often be a case of content that was written after the event and dated prior to it.  You might be asking yourself why anyone would do that, and the simple answer is SEO - Search Engine Optimisation.  At its most basic level SEO is used to make your site appear higher in search results by optimising its content.  Sites that are relatively new can use post dated articles to improve their performance, especially if they then create new content that links back to the older post dated content.  Search engines prefer content to have a date reference as to when it was posted which can often motivate creators to make their sites look older than they actually are.

There are some websites such as the Internet Archive which has a Wayback Machine which allows you to see what a site looked like years ago, for example Youtube from 2007 but this requires the archive to have been aware the site existed at the time and to have crawled it.  In most cases sites appearing in the archive have been manually submitted by their creators.  Likewise there are other ways of determining how old a site is in terms of its domain name but those too only take into account the purchase of the domain, not the content of the site. 

It demonstrates the point that we often look back at our history with disappointment that certain historical records weren't kept or that certain types of data weren't collected when we come to need that data.  Hindsight can be a wonderful thing but writing about day to day life from a specific time period or covering the politics of that time period can be difficult without the data to back it up.  Even those organisations that attempt to document our culture such as polling organisations are limited in what they can record by the questions they ask.  It's hard to find a specific answer if the specific question was not asked and inferring the result from others can be dangerously misleading especially if you judge historical moments with a modern mentality.  As I have said before, when man first set foot on the moon it was a moment of wonder and awe for most of the world, the day man sets foot on Mars is much more likely to be met with "Finally, what took so long!?" which shows how priorities and the impact of events can completely change in the space of a few decades - LGBT rights around the world are another example, modern victories are often met with that same sentiment rather than one of revolution.