Whose heroes? Whose Wales?

September 7, 2004 2:47 PM

Earlier this year the Labour run Welsh Assembly funded a web project to find 100 Welsh Heroes. The winner was Aneurin Bevan, a Labour politician. Now, the IT manager who ran the project says that he was instructed to fix the results. More inside...
posted by ceiriog (10 comments total)

David Jones, the ex-IT manager at Culturenet, says that the vote rigging was done partly to ensure that the project didn't look too low-brow (the real winner, according to Jones, was another Jones) and partly to ensure that certain nationalists didn't look too popular.

Jones has since lost his job at Culturenet, according to him (in this Wired article) because he dared to criticise the official Welsh Assembly website (for breaking every rule in the web standards book) and to come up with a better version of his own.

According to Jones, Culturenet could easily prove that his allegations are unfounded, by having an independent observer run

..Two simple SQL queries. One to report on the votes table to show that a large number of votes had been discounted. Another to show the number of votes all mysteriously posted with the same spurious email address at the same time on a Monday morning.

The poll results themselves would be neither here nor there, and the waste of tax payers' money on such trivial pursuits is small potatoes compared to other recent scandals in Wales, but for the fact that the statistically insignificant (and probably corrupt anyway) results are being used to teach schoolchildren who Wales' official heroes are.

Meanwhile, the Assembly's Minister for Culture, Alun Pugh, seems strangely reluctant to take David Jones' allegations seriously. Could this have anything to do with the entirely unrelated matter of a Labour party member recently being appointed head of the Welsh Language Board under slightly dubious circumstances?

As we say round here, sgersli bilîf.
posted by ceiriog at 2:48 PM on September 7, 2004

I should probably add (and then shut the heck up) that there are some things about Jones' version that strike me as a little odd, such as the brand-new weblog which ran the interview with him being run by someone who shares Jones' interests in webby matters like RSS, but is practically un-Googlable.

That doesn't seem right to me, but I may be being paranoid (having just been warned off this story by someone who read something I wrote about it in Welsh earlier today).
posted by ceiriog at 3:02 PM on September 7, 2004

Welsh Parliament in Pointless Fuckup Shock
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:21 PM on September 7, 2004

Catherine Zeta Jones beat out Prince Llywelyn? The public should not be asked their opinion about anything.

I would have voted for Gelert, Bart Roberts or Jeff from "Coupling" before her.

the Jeff character. Not Richard Coyle. I know he's not really welsh
posted by Mayor Curley at 3:24 PM on September 7, 2004

I met Richard Coyle in Boots the other guy. Lovely chap.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:48 PM on September 7, 2004

No Harry Secombe? That's bull, man.
posted by clevershark at 4:28 PM on September 7, 2004

Aneurin came to our house
And stole a piece of beef.
posted by jfuller at 5:09 PM on September 7, 2004

Aneurin came to our house
And stole a piece of beef.

Leave Taffy out of this!
posted by Mayor Curley at 6:17 PM on September 7, 2004

Hey, Tom Jones beat King Arthur! Dolorous stroke indeed.
posted by kenko at 6:34 PM on September 7, 2004

I met Richard Coyle in Boots the other guy. Lovely chap.

"day" or "guy" drunkie? Because I saw Martin Freeman at the Tate Modern and I still can't judge his character.
posted by Mayor Curley at 7:03 PM on September 7, 2004