Online research – how to tell a good source from a not so good one
Recently, I was at a talk about online media where the speakers were a online journalist and a sci-fi writer. They were saying that one of the most important skills students have to pickup is the skill of information descrimination. We got to be able to look at webs, blogs, wikis, forums and figure out what piece of info can be relied upon.
So how do I make sure that the website or the blog I am getting my info from is indeed reliable? How do I make sure that the author of that site has done his/her own research? How do I make sure that the guy who calls himself an expert is actually referred to by other professionals in that particular field?
Following are some of the techniques I use whenever I refer to a site.
1. Using WHO IS to check the owner of the site.
Lets say I find this site with great information on China, chinadigitaltimes.com, I can find out which organization is behind this site but doing a WHO IS search.
Go to the site whois.net
Type in chinadigitaltimes.net next to the “Who IS lookup†field and submit.
The site will bring up the registration information for this site. You will be able to see the people/organization running this site.
2. Finding out how many people are linking to this site
If a site is popular many other sites would link to it. You can use Google to find this data. Go to Google search and in the search field type the following
Link: chinadigitaltimes.net
3. Go to icerocket.com. Type in the following in the search field
chinadigitaltimes.net
4. Icerocket engine can also be used to check on what conversations people are having about a person or a company. It is a good way of running a background check on the author of a blog or web.
Go to icerocket.com. Type in the name of some person or a product and submit. Icerocket will find blogs that are talking about the term you entered.
5. You can also use blogpulse.com
7. If the content is a blog post then look for the comments. Comments may refute or agree with the author. Comments often link to other related sources.
On Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia popular with students. Wikipedia is totally built by volunteers and many people question such an approach of knowledge building.
There are some ways in which you can check how much research has gone into an article on wikipedia.
1) Look for a banner that says “The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article are disputed”. If you do find such a banner then you will have to do further research on the content provided.
2) Look at the “history” of that page. The history page will tell you how many times and how many people have edited the article. Click on few of the names and check what other articles in the same field of knowledge they have authored.
3) Look for “Further Reading” and “External Links” at the bottom of the article. An extensive list of references means that someone has actually taken trouble to refer to these.
