This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander.

On this week's program, we'll be taking a closer look at the US Department of

Defence's use of floppy disks. But first loyal listener Rachel Harvey got in touch

with us on Twitter to ask this question.

Is it really true that the average stay in a refugee camp is now 17 years?

It's a commonly quoted statistic.

In the last month we've read this on CNN, the Huffington Post and

the Abu Dhabi publication The National. But where does it come from and is there any truth in it?

This became an important question for Benjamin Thomas White

from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Working on a history of refugee camps he noticed that this figure was

coming up again and again and like all good

historians he wanted to establish the source. It probably comes from a 2006 publication by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees,

entitled the State of the World's Refugees.

What it said is, it is estimated that the average duration of major refugee situations protracted or not has increased from nine years in 1993 to 17 years in 2003.

Now you notice a couple of striking things about this.

First of all, that doesn't refer to camps.

And yet the 17 years figure is most often quoted as the average length of stay

in a refugee camp. The other problem with that statement is that as the average length of Stena Refugee Camp.

The other problem with that statement is that that's from a 2006 document referring to the

situation in 2003.

So even by the time that was published it was a few years out of date and now it's

...