Page 265 - Foundations of Learning, 4th Edition (Revised)

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Evaluating Credibility

Select one of the following terms: solar power blue cheeses gas tax shinto

vegetarianism cable news cloning revisionism

Using your favorite search engine, run a search on the phrase you selected. Select the first site that came
up in your results and explore the credibility of the site, using the form on the following page (note, you
may need to browse to an information page from the home page). Then use the tenth site that came up in
your search results and follow the same procedure for that site. Answer the following questions:

1. What were your site scores? ________ and ________

2. Were you surprised by what you found, when you began using the scoring tool? Why or why not? Were
there other signs you found that led you to think your sites were more or less credible than what the
scores indicated? If so, what were they?

Lindsey’s response: Both sites I checked scored 14. And what’s really strange is that 259
one of sites used the other one as a source! I was surprised that I was unable to find
more information about the author on the second site. I was also surprised that my
first site (a Wikipedia site) contained a history of how the site had been edited and
changed, and links to the people who made the changes. I was really surprised at
how much the page had changed in two years! I wouldn’t have noticed that about
Wikipedia if I hadn’t been scoring the site. BOTH of the sites I scored contained
advisories. The Wiki site stated, right up front, that the article didn’t cite any
references or sources and that while there was a list of resources (which included
my 2nd site), there were no in-text citations. My second site actually said that I’d better
keep my fingers crossed! Both warnings made me realize that though 14 looks like a
high score, you can only MAYBE trust information and HAVE TO VERIFY it.

Chapter 10 — Finding and Working with Sources