Traveller Vignette 054

We like to imagine Library Data is always reliable, but the need to propagate information across vast interstellar distances means sometimes it is less accurate than we might wish. Some things are simple mistakes, as when translation/transliteration from Terran Spanish to Vilani then back to Galanglic meant that for over a century, Library Data in the Spinward sectors listed Don Quixote's companion as "Sancho Panzer" or when the Vilani AAB listed "Paper Jam" as a traditional Terran foodstuff.

A more famous example occurred during the initial expansion out of Sylea after the Long Night, when an error during optical scanning of old, faded hardcopy logs misread the population digit for a world as "8" (tens of millions) rather than "3" (thousands). A speculative trader arrived shortly after re-contact with a hold full of commemorative mugs celebrating the accession of Cleon II, assuming that the locals would want to show support for the new regime. However, the incorrect population estimate meant he'd brought roughly 4,000 mugs for each inhabitant, and hundreds of crates were simply piled on a vacant lot near the backwater starport, where they became a local landmark. In an odd twist, the pile of crates were still there almost three centuries later, when somebody realised that commemorative items from Cleon II's short reign were valuable collectibles, and sale of the mugs - many in near perfect condition, protected by their plastiboard crates - formed a significant part of planetary revenue for several years.

Others began as intentional hoaxes, such as the spoof travel guide to the fictitious San Serife system created by computer science students at the University of Jewell. This almost ended in tragedy when an ill-advised free trader tried to jump to the purported location of the system. Their onboard nav computer overrode the jump, but had it not done so, the trader's crew would have faced lingering death in empty space, with no way to refuel for a return jump.

Fictitious entries were also created as "copyright traps" in some reference materials - if the fictitious entry showed up in another publication, it proved the data had been plagiarised from the original source. The Solomani Encyclopedia Galactica was particularly prone to this, with famous past examples being the fictitious careers of Taro Tsujimoto (supposedly a pre-spaceflight Terran hockey player) or Lord-General Mountwezel, purportedly a military dictator during the Ramshackle Empire.

Finally, some are relics of long-ended information wars, like forgotten landmines still dangerous to the unwary. We now know that the Outworld Coalition began InfoWar operations against the Imperium years before the Fifth Frontier War broke out, corrupting navigational data and inserting fictitious ships and officers into the Imperial Navy order of battle.

(Author's note - a sadistic referee can easily use false or misleading library data to create problems for players, though doing it regularly is likely to create bad feeling and it's only far to warn them that library data can be fallible, perhaps by giving them the vignette above. Most of the examples mentioned are actually real - the San Seriffe supplement was published in the British guardian newspaper as an April Fool in 1977, while Taro Tsujimoto was a fictitious player for the Buffalo Sabres, created as a joke by the team's coach and Lilian Mountweazel was a fictional artist used as a copyright trap by a 1970s Canadian encyclopedia)

I suspect that "Library data" isn't actually a single database but perhaps closer to a search engine running over multiple databases. As to accuracy...look at how well we're doing keeping data on the web accurate over a single world, and then extrapolate.

The Third Imperium probably has laws against any such intentional misinformation making its way into the public databases. Perhaps there’s a Bureau of Data Clarity that works to consolidate, vet, and update information from across the Imperium, which may well use scouts to travel the outer sectors, cross-checking facts....which gives another way for players to get involved)