What URLs tell you
It might seem like you can trust any website that has .edu or .gov in the URL. But here are a few things to watch out for:
In some cases, like this one, the entire higher-education organization is responsible for the information. The organization can be investigated.
This is another example of a .edu organization that is taking responsibility for what's on the website. There's an individual author, but the organization approved the publication of this article. The author couldn't have just posted whatever they wanted.
But here's an example of something that was posted on a .edu website, but would NOT be a good information source for a school research assignment.
There are no clues about why this article was posted or whether anyone other than the author fact-checked the information.
The most likely scenario is that this is a homework assignment submitted online by a student--someone who is studying the topic, but not yet an expert. If it was a homework assignment, we don't know what grade Sarah Gregor got.
When there are so few clues and so few options for investigating, it's better to keep looking for better information sources.
One other thing to keep in mind about .edu websites is that information on them might have been posted by a professor. In most cases, being a professor at a university is an excellent clue that someone is an expert on a topic.
But it's worth noting that some professors are less expert than others--and that some professors may have motivations to misrepresent the truth, as in this case.
Websites with .gov in the URL are typically considered reliable, especially when an entire agency is responsible for the information, as in this case.
You could probably get into an interesting debate about how much we should trust government agencies, but let's look at something else that's important to keep in mind.
Just like individual students and professors can post (pretty much) whatever they want on the .edu site of their university, individual politicians can post (pretty much) whatever they want on the .gov site of their government institution.
In this case, a state senator has posted a press release on the Washington State Senate Democrats website.
Although many politicians are trying to spread accurate information about issues they care about, they are not usually considered experts on topics such as climate change (like scientists are).
It's also possible that their purpose is either to promote their own work to persuade people to vote for them or to promote a side of an issue to persuade people in favor of that side to donate to their campaigns. There's a chance, though not a guarantee, that individual politicians might misrepresent the truth because their perspectives have been distorted by bias.
It's harder to investigate politicians' track records for reporting fairly and accurately so, as a rule, it's better NOT to use their websites as information sources for a school research assignment.
