Reflection- Credibitily of Websites

I probably do not think about the authenticity of the websites I view often enough. To be honest though, I typically do not have a lot riding on the information I collect from the ones that I should be doubting more than I am. However, I do usually take websites with endings like .gov or .edu as more reliable than ones that end in .com and any information that I collect for things like school work or research I usually take from peer reviewed articles or authentic websites. I could not really think of a list of things I do to make sure a website is authentic so I did a little research by simply typing in “checking website authenticity” into a google search bar and thousands of pages came up. One such page was a yahoo answers page in which a person asked “How can I found out if a website is credible and accurate?” (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071212122051AAD1B7x). As unimpressive as the grammar and wording in the question was, yahoo user “liz t” received half a dozen responses to the question. One response that I particularly liked that I think I would use to help teach young learners about evaluating websites for credibility is for them to ask themselves the following questions:

1) Are there none or only a few advertisements?
2) Has the author of the article/webpage famous/heard of/reliable? Does the author have experience?
3) Is grammar and spelling correct?
4) Do they list sources or links to support this? Do they provide any follow-up websites for more info?

Even though these questions will help students determine whether or not a website is credible I feel that the most important thing that students can do to determine if a website is credible is to use their common sense when reading the information given to them. Taking the websites given to us, for example, a Northwest Tree Octopus is ridiculous. Also, checking facts against other reliable resources is a very important step for all students to take. I imagine we’ll be covering more on this in class because I feel like I should know more about it. I don’t really consider myself a fool for fake information and I even question information given to me from sources other than the internet such as magazines or conversation. One thing that is extremely convenient about the internet is that you can check the information you find against other websites with just a few clicks where as before the internet this process was much longer and more difficult to do.