Your child is writing an essay for school, and finds a site on the Internet that is very interesting and useful for his or her paper. But is it true? Is the information trustworthy? There’s a site about Martin Luther King Jr written by a white supremacist group. There’s another website site claiming that the moon landings never took place written by a guy in his garage. Should you believe the information you read on either of those sites? Here are some tips for figuring it out:
1) The first thing to look for is who wrote the site. Everybody has a point of view, and you should know what it is. Reliable sites will have the author’s or organization’s name in an obvious place. You should also be able to find a link to “About us” that tells about the organization and their goals. The two sites I reference above don’t have this information.
2) Look up at the address bar. Does it have a “.com” or “.org”? Anybody at all can create a website with those top level domain names. If you have any questions, you can always search Google using whois Samplesite to find out who the site is really registered to. Does it have a “.gov” or “.edu”? Those sites are hosted by either the government or an accredited educational institution. In fact, when you use Google, you can limit your results to only those sites by typing in site:.edu samplesearch or site:.gov samplesearch.
3) Did you find a great article on Wikipedia? Wikipedia is what is known as a “stepping stone” site. That means that your child shouldn’t use the information in the article directly for their paper, but it is a great source to find information they can use via the links to outside resources listed at the bottom.
4) Finally, Sno-Isle has a great collection of databases with good, reliable information. Go to www.sno-isle.org, hover over the “Databases and Research” in the blue bar, and choose one of the broad topics. We have databases that cover everything from country information to biographies, from science to all sides of controversial topics.
Using these tools and tips, you can be confident that the information you find is much more likely to be true. And if you have further questions, about any of this, don’t hesitate to ask any of us at the Information Desk at your library!
Good information, Kathy. I posted a few posts back about Wikipedia, and how they claimed George Washington used sharks to attack the British! I'm sure it was just a typo, but nobody caught it...
ReplyDeleteHmmm--surprised there was no mention that the libraries in Sno-Isle have programs for babies!
ReplyDeleteIn recent studies, Wikipedia was proven to be as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yes, it has some very interesting glitches, but to be fair a lot of those are very obviously wrong. I would not be surprised if within the next few years Wikipedia is considered as credible a source as most encyclopedias.
ReplyDeleteFor the most part I fully agree, and appreciate what it written here. There is one thing I have to comment on though. Not everyone can get a .org website. Yes, they are fairly easy to get, but you HAVE to have an organization of some sort behind it. And proof of this organization. The Sno-Isle site is a .org for this reason. For those sites, check out the organization who runs it to find out how credible it is.