How I Research Online and Offline

Today many people do research on the web using search engines (primarily Google). I wonder if the next generation might forget how to use traditional research methods. I have to admit that I too do most research on the web -- being that one doesn't have to leave the house and can be in one's pajamas. Google and Wikipedia are my best web friends. However, there are times when traditional research methods are still needed, and hence we must not forget them.

Let's take the example of when I was writing the article about the international music group Il Divo. I wanted to find out what the words "Il Divo" meant. It should be a simple several second query on Google. But no, the ambiguous results that this particular query gave me had throw me into a research wild goose chase that lasted a couple of hours online and offline. Now it became personal. It is a mystery I can not let go. It is a detective story where I must know the ending. And here is the story.

(Well, I guess for someone who speaks Italian, it would be no mystery at all.  It would be easy as to what Il Divo meant.  But I don't speak Italian, so it is a mystery for me.)

Let start the research online. I Googled "Il Divo" which brought me some results like ...

• From Wikipedia.org: Il Divo, (Italian for "star" or "celebrity")
• From WikiAnswers.com: Someone gave the answer: Il Divo means "Divine Male Performer" in Italian.
• From ChaCha.com: Someone gave the answer "Basically, il divo means the divine. ChaCha on!". Another person gave the answer as: " 'Il Divo' is "The Divo" in Italian. There is no other English translation of the word divo. More translations or questions today? "
• From Babylon.com: Il Divo, Italian for "divine male performer", is an international operatic pop vocal group created by pop impresario Simon Cowell ... See more at Wikipedia.org
• From encyclo.co.uk: "`Il Divo`, Italian for `divine male performer`, is an international operatic pop vocal group created by pop impresario Simon Cowell ..." and then it said found on Wikipedia.

Basically, the last two answers "divine male performer" had been copied from Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has since changed its definition to "star" after the copy. See below section "Wikipedia Edits" if you are curious as to how this definition had changed.

Now I know it is Italian. But which is it? "divine male performer" or "star". I admit they can be considered close. But the meanings are not identical.

So I used Babelfish.yahoo.com and ask it to translate "il divo" from Italian to English. It gave me the English answer as "the divo". I already can guess that "il" is an article of some sort. Now I know it is equivalent to the word "the". But what is "divo"? Is that even an English word? Let me see what Dictionary.com say "divo" is. It said "No results found". I guess dictionary.com do not consider it to be an English word either. That means that Babelfish didn't know how to translate "divo" and was just repeating the unknown input in its output. ("Garbage in, garbage out" as they say it in computer speak).

Since BabelFish didn't help me, it is time to research using more traditional research methods.

Okay, I'm going to figure out what "divo" means once and for all. I will use the traditional method of looking it up in a dictionary. Yes, that's right -- a book. Of course, I don't have a Italian-English dictionary. So I went to the closest public library (oh yeah, remember those?) I pulled out a book with call numbers "R 453 SAN 1995" which is the "Harper Collin's Sanson: Italian Unabridged Dictionary" 3rd edition copyright 1995 -- ISBN 88-383-0880-2.

Quite a heavy book too. You see, these type of books has two sections: one section is when you want to translate from English to Italian. Another section for when you want to translate from Italian to English. I looked in the second section. By the way, the words are ordered alphabetically. (It may sound like I'm being sarcastic. But you have to remember that future generations who are reading this may not have much encounters of archaic devices such as these types of books).

Anyways, on page 1696, the definition for the Italian word "il" is the English word "the". Dictionary also notes that it is "used before all masculine nouns beginning with a consonant".

On page 1566, it gives two definitions for the Italian word "divo". The first definition is "divine, godlike". The second definition is "stage celebrity, popular figure, hero, star, idol".

The first definition is an adjective.  The second defintion is a noun.  Hence, when "divo" is preceeded with an article as in "il divo", it implies that the "divo" is an masculine noun.  Hence the second definition is correct.  "il divo" means "star" as in "celebrebrity".  

So this is one case where traditional research methods trumps online searches.

I got an idea. You see, every change in the Wikipedia entry is tracked. (I know this because I read the book Wikipedia Revolution and have written about the Wikipedia Phenomenon).

Looking through the "history" of the Wikipedia entry, I see that "divine male (performer)" had been change to "The Divs" on 12:44 January 20, 2009 by anonymous user at IP "193.54.109.8" .

It was changed to "star or celebrity" by user "Dieter Simon" on 00:29 January 22, 2009 with the comment: "Divo is Italian for "star" or "celebrity" and has been so for many years. "Divs" is a recent coinage in English."

The very next edit about 19 hours later, an anonymous user of a different IP "92.102.77.112" changed it back to "The Divs".

The next edit occurred on January 25, 2009 when Dieter Simon reverted the last edit back to "star or celebrity".

There may have been other edits of this definition at other times, but even I don't have the inclination to research all the edit instances of this Wikipedia post from December 2004 to 2009.

The series of Wikipedia edits (although not as great of a flurry as some of the other Wikipedia edit wars) is indicating to me strength of Dieter Simon's conviction of the term "il divo" to mean "star". Plus his comment that he entered helped too.

Okay, that settles it. I'm using that interpretation in my article. "Il Divo" is Italian for "star" as in celebrity.

This is an example of where Wikipedia's organic nature has a self-correction mechanism. Whereas the other sites that had static content did not.

The Wikipedia entry for "Il Divo" also had mentioned "Il Divo was named the Most Multinational UK No.1 Album Group in the 2006 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records." That sounded like an interesting fact to put in my article. However, that particular sentence was not sourced like often times it is for other factual statements. You understand, that anyone with an internet connection can make edits and additions to Wikipedia entries. One can be totally anonymous (except they know your IP address) and one do not even need to login or anything.  So even with Wikipedia's self-correcting mechanism, I have to be critical of random un-sourced facts like this.

If I can find another source to collaborate this, then I would use that fact at face value. So I search the web. But I was not able to find any other independent source that collaborated this. The other ones I did found were mere copies of each other or copies of the Wikipedia statement. I even did a site specific search on guinnessworldrecords.com. The difficulty is because this fact was noted in Guinness book 2006 edition. Current year is 2009. Even libraries may not keep that many editions back. In fact the library where I used the Italian-English dictionary did not have the 2006 edition. The librarian looked in the catalog, saw that another library had the 2006 edition, and phoned them to hold it for me.

Okay, off we go to the second library. I now got the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records in my hands. Now let's see if in fact Il Divo was named "Most Multinational UK No.1 Album Group" or not.

Books of this type have a thing called the "index" at the back. I looked under "most multinational" and "multinational". Nope, not in index. So I flipped through to the entertainment and record album sections. And behold, on page 159 it says ...

"Most Multinational UK No. 1 Album Group: The group Il Divo had four different nationalities making up their numbers when their album Il Divo reached the No 1 spot on November 13, 2004."

Wikipedia was right. Fact collaborated. I put it in my article.

Yes, writing articles is a lot of work. The online and offline research (including the drive to both libraries) took a couple of hours at least. Granted I don't research so extensively for each article. But still...

Actually, I didn't mind. I was curious of a fact. And once I encountered the mystery of the dual interpretation of the words "Il Divo", I had to see it to the end. 

Now I understand why the hundreds and maybe thousands of writers of Wikipedia put in their un-paid time to put contents into massive Wikipedia -- some spending hours like me fact-checking one piece of arcane trivia. That's why for the most part, I tend to have faith in the accuracy of the Wikipedia content and believe in its self-correcting mechanism.  Nevertheless, I still always have to use critical thinking and be wary of un-sourced and un-collabrated facts out on the internet.