WWW. huh?.com

Credibility of Internet Material

Have you ever blatantly just assumed what you’re reading online is true? Well I have. I read an article on a website that discussed being aware of the credibility of what you’re reading online, and boy did I learn a ton.

I have always been one to know that Wikipedia has the potential to be mostly false, and I can trust websites that seem reliable otherwise. In this article, one of the first things I learned was to evaluate websites with a series of questions and investigative knowledge about the author of the source. With the amount of questions in the article to ask yourself, I realized that there is a lot more to websites than you would assume.

These types of questions to ask yourself are things I typically would just ASSUME are answered and reliable in the article. Such as the author’s credentials, the author’s publications and how current the article is. In addition, I also learned different kinds of websites and how I can know which ones would be credible or not.

For example, a news site will generally have an ISSN number if it has more authority compared to other sites. In professional sites, if it has links to other sources, then that is where the credibility is coming from. Little things like that I was made aware of in order to know if the source I am reading is reliable or not.

The last thing I learned is that you can deconstruct a URL to find out where the source of it originated. The little pieces of it reveals more about the website than I would have thought. Altogether, with these three components that I learned from the article, I am more aware that you can not just assume what you’re reading is fully true.