When you set out to build a site such as this, you're acutely aware of two things - firstly, you've just taken on one heck of a lot of work (but then you knew that before you hit the first key on the keyboard) and, secondly, you are going to have to be very careful assembling your "facts", because there will be a growing number of people out there looking in on your pages and a proportion of them will be just dying for you to make a mistake that they can pick you up on.

Fairenoughski - unless you're writing some kind of satire, you owe it to your "public" to be accurate, otherwise why should you expect them to respect your efforts and keep coming back to your site?

So, you know and accept that ninety per cent of your effort is going to be spent on research, as opposed to the other ten per cent spent on writing, image-editing and page construction. That means hundreds - eventually thousands - of hours of reading through books and ploughing through web pages, which is okay - and certainly better than even thinking about watching so-called reality TV.

No matter how much you think you already know about a subject, there is always plenty more to discover, and that's probably the reason why people like me build sites like this, as much for our own pleasure as for the hope that we will instill a love of our subject in others - in just six weeks I think I may have already doubled the sum of my knowledge of my own city!

Which is great fun and very rewarding - until you start hitting on contradictions.

Search five web sites and read through three books on a given topic and I'll all-but guarantee you'll find either anomalies, or downright contradictions - which means that at least one of your historian resources has dropped a clanger.

It may be that he or she has just hit the wrong key when entering a date, or it may equally be that they have picked up on a wrong name, a wrong location, or a bit of anectdotal evidence that the original "researcher" took as gospel, without ever verifying it.

So, if you have five sources and one of them has a differing version, that must be the erroneous one? Not always, as one of the things about the Internet especially is that some "historians" and certainly those operators using history as a vehicle to attract local advertisers, tend to cut and paste material from other sources - as often as not it's come from Wikipedia, and although I think Wikipedia is a brilliant resource, you really do have to double check any facts you glean from it. A lot of people don't!

Personally, copying or just slightly rehashing someone else's efforts is a cheapskate tactic; if you can't at least think that you've done something a fair bit better than what was there before, why bother in the first place?

Besides, as a wise man once said, taking all your material from one source is plagiarism - taking it from several sources is "research"! Too true ...

And what can be really frustrating is, having trawled every pond, lake and sea of information and then written up and posted up your piece, to find, maybe several days or weeks later, whilst researching something entirely different, an authenticated fact that gives the lie to something you said originally.

Stop what you were doing, back-track and check some more and then do whatever corrections were necessary and hope you haven't implanted a gem of bullshine into the brain of someone who could possibly retrieve that and use it in an important examination - like a pub quiz?

What I always ask anyone who is likely to be working their way through my site is: please, if you think you've spotted something that's slipped through the net, click on one of the e-mail icons and let me know. Even if it turns out that it was you who were wrong and not me, it's better I find out for sure - and I really do appreciate the interest people show in this matter.

But please remember, no one - certainly not me - makes mistakes deliberately, and none of us is superhuman, or infallible. But with a bit of well-intentioned external input, we can get pretty damned close!

Many thanks,