How do we know if it’s true?

This conversations stems from an email exchange with a group of librarians who circulated a story about wikipedia having some inaccuracies. I indicated some concerns about the email (what is authoritative, anyway?), and they were nice enough to reply. 

In using internet sources, I teach my students to evaluate the “Authority” of the information—who is the author and what are the credentials? My reluctance to use Wikipedia centers on this issue.  Please explain how Wikipedia ranks.

Ah.

I use a different criteria to evaluate the authenticity of a website.

In my humble opinion, truth is gleaned from visiting multiple sources, rather than trusting one authoritative site.  Let’s poke at some examples: 

Example 1:

I note the CIA, an eminently authoritative source, got it Really Wrong.  If we used the multiple source strategy, though, we saw tremendous disagreement amongst several high-profile sources.

Example 2:

In the specific case of Wikipedia, I invite you to look at this list of journaled encyclopedia articles:

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/multimedia/438900a_m1.html

It certainly shows there are errors in Britannica as well as Wikipedia…so how do we know what is true? I think only by identifying and visiting multiple sources.  I think Wikipedia, Britannica, Encarta, and perhaps some other sites can be used as resources (I teach my kids .gov and .edu sites can be generally trusted without much digging, but .com and .org sites should be investigated). I think this whole issue is about multiple sources, and evaluating information.

Example 3:This site is slightly disturbing, so please visit it carefully.

www (dot) martinlutherking (dot) org (simply replace the (dots) with .‘s - I don’t want to add to the google rank of this page). 

It looks like a legitimate site, but a brief scroll through the articles shows the page is actually hosted and run by a hateful white-supremacist group! A search for Martin Luther King on google, or ask jeeves, will certainly paint a very different picture of MLK.  It is up to our kids to evaluate the information they see. I think this is an important life-skill for our students in 2005.

Example 4:

These are two famous internet hoax sites.  I use them to teach my kids how to evaluate a website.

http://descy.50megs.com/descy/webcred/webcred/dhmo.html
http://www.dhmo.org/

(Dihydrogen Monoxide is another name for water).

I also use this site to evaluate websites (it’s a hoax):

http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

The only possible way kids can know if one of these sites are legitimate is to visit other sites, and consider other sources of information.  Then make up their minds based on the evidence at hand.

I think evaluating information holds a higher priority than an authoritative source.  It’s an uncomfortable gray area, I think…the truth is not always clear, and it’s up to us as educators to teach kids to “separate the froth from the foam” (as Dewey says).