On Internet Information Reliability: "Is any info trustworthy?"

After analysing websites and reading the official criteria to say whether these pages were “good” or “bad”, I’ve realized that sometimes we don’t take into consideration any criteria and believe in everything we see on the internet. Not only we trust in any website we come across, but we also usually are an echelon in the chain of displaying information that may not necessarily be correct or true. Think about how many times you used internet to do a practical work at school without verifying the information you used or not paying too much attention to the sources utilized. I must admit that just some years ago I acknowledged the existence of “scholar.google.com” where you can find official books and articles about any topic. Anyhow, sometimes I still search for other sources of information that may not be appropriately endorsed.

Let me give you a clear example: Wikipedia, the most famous world-wide source of information. Have you thought about it in terms of the criteria suggested to “judge” this website’s validity?
A quick analysis would be that the website is not completely a deception, but that you cannot yet fully rely on it. It is true that it contains the sources where the articles and descriptions are based on. It also contains the author of the information in many occasions. Is it enough to trust all information included there? After all, we readers can edit any information uploaded there whether we have a PhD or are children surfing in the internet. So… what to do?

That’s an interesting question for us teachers-to-be who sometimes take information to the classroom about different topics that we may not know about. What’s more, we may not find the information we need in official pages or articles, but we may do in Wikipedia. In this case, do we trust it? Do we take for certain something that could have been edited by a 6-year-old child?

Well, I’ve been through this situation because I had to do a research on monarchs from all around the world. Let me tell you that it was not easy and in some cases the most complete resource of information was Wikipedia. What I did was to compare the information to other sources and to have a look at the resources used to write the biographies. Of course, this took me ages! An amount of time I’m sure I won’t have when I graduate. Thus, I’m still wondering where to find quality information, reliable resources. Not saying this is a problem that has just come up, because at times when books where the only source, the information was sometimes not “good” either.

The only thing I know for sure is that we shouldn’t trust everything we find in the internet, and need to make thorough researches when using information for our English lessons. Or else we could present the “tree octopus” as part of the world’s wildlife!