Website Credibility

The goal here is to get you to stop and think, just for a second, before you plunge into a website and assume that everything that you read on a given site is true.

As we turn you loose onto the vast interwebz to find information for your inquiry question for the Russian Revolution unit, you need some way to start to gauge whether or not you can believe what you read on the various websites you end up at. Below is a kind of mental checklist. The more of these questions you can answer 'yes' to, the more credible the website is. These questions are grouped into three chunks - work through the upper section first, then proceed.

• Look at the title and headings. Do they seem applicable to what you are researching?
• Is the author of the website listed?
• Is the site free from grammatical and spelling errors?
• Is the author an expert in the field? (You might need to do some googling here…)
• Are the sources for the facts in the article provided and/or cited?
• To the best of your knowledge, is the site free from factual errors?
• Can you corroborate the facts found here in other sources?
• Is the site free from bias? (Look for extreme language, personal connections or group affiliations, but also who would have supported the publication of this information - this may lead to bias as well)

In addition, you'll be doing some Google searching. Want to figure out how to create a better search string? Go read this article right quick. You'll be a better searcher. Promise.