Everyone knows how to find a reliable source, right? We were taught from a relatively young age which sources look true and factual. In fact, we can identify credible sources just from the URL: .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and so on. We can tell from the look of a website if it was a site run by a university or a blog site run by a mother. Scanning the text, we should be able to pick out if the information was knowledgeable and written by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Simple enough?
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That’s what I thought too…until an exercise in class proved me wrong. Our professor gave us a list of websites that were paired based on the same topics. I breezed through the worksheet circling all of the obvious choices. It wasn’t until we went over the answers that I realized the reliable websites weren’t very obvious at all.
Specifically, one of the website pairings was about Martin Luther King Jr. You had a choice between Wikipedia and a “.org” website with a nationally published columnist. Based on first looks, the choice is clear, right? In fact, if you do a little extra research, you will learn that the “.org” website was written by an obscure author and was hosted by Stormfront. Who is Stormfront? I’ll tell you, drum roll please…a white nationalist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum that was the Web’s first major racial hate site.
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Don’t worry, I was cringing too. Let me just say, this class exercise definitely opened up my eyes. Just because a website has a credible URL doesn’t mean that the site is automatically reliable. Especially if you need to pull quotes from a site, you want to make sure that the website is the correct speaker to be talking about a topic. Imagine writing about MLK Jr. only to realize you quoted from a white supremacist group. Embarrassing. Don’t let that be you. Do the extra work and dig a little deeper to find reliable sources. It’ll be worth it, believe me.