Do you often take what is on the Internet as truth without thinking much about it?

Today, information is very easy to get through Internet. For me, I don't really take what is on the internet as truth without thinking much about it. Yes, there are a lot of information can be find on Internet but are they credible enough? Anyone from this planet can create a professional looks website/weblog. The website may impress us but we shouldn't trust easily. We need to find who's the author, is he/she has credibility to write something on that area.

We should know what kind of information do we need. Are we going to find factual ideas, opinions or statistics? or are you searching for a new idea?

Media culture class has assists me to think, ponder and reflect about what is media about. For instance, this week I have been given this topic to discuss and it has made me more alert about what type of information and sources can be trusted.

Herewith I attached some tips that can help us to determine what type of sources can be relied. I found this tips from this website :

http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm

Source Selection Tip:

Try to select sources that offer as much of the following information as possible:
Author's Name
Author's Title or Position
Author's Organizational Affiliation
Date of Page Creation or Version
Author's Contact Information
Some of the Indicators of Information Quality (listed below)

What we need for information quality

Credibility

Because people have always made important decisions based on information, evidence of authenticity and reliability--or credibility, believability--has always been important. If you read an article saying that the area where you live will experience a major earthquake in the next six months, it is important that you should know whether or not to believe the information. Some questions you might ask would include, What about this source makes it believable (or not)? How does this source know this information? Why should I believe this source over another? As you can see, the key to credibility is the question of trust.

There are several tests you can apply to a source to help you judge how credible and useful it will be:

Author's Credentials

The author or source of the information should show some evidence of being knowledgeable, reliable, and truthful. Here are some clues:

• Author's education, training, and/or experience in a field relevant to the information. Look for biographical information, the author's title or position of employment
• Author provides contact information (email or snail mail address, phone number)
• Organizational authorship from a known and respected organization (corporate, governmental, or non-profit)
• Author's reputation or standing among peers.
• Author's position (job function, title)

Evidence of Quality Control

Most scholarly journal articles pass through a peer review process, whereby several readers must examine and approve content before it is published. Statements issued in the name of an organization have almost always been seen and approved by several people. (But note the difference between, "Allan Thornton, employee of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency, says that a new ice age is near," and "The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency said today that a new ice age is near." The employee is speaking for himself, whereas a statement in the name of NOAA represents the official position of NOAA.)

Evidence of quality control of Internet material includes these items:

• Information presented on organizational web sites
• On-line journals that use refereeing (peer review) by editors or others
• Postings of information taken from books or journals that have a quality control process

Metainformation

Metainformation is information about information. Information workers (sometimes called knowledge workers) all over the world are constantly poring over, processing, and evaluating information--and making notes. As the challenges produced by the increasing quantity of information continue, access to high quality metainformation will become increasingly important. Metainformation can take many forms, but there are two basic types, summary and evaluative.

Summary metainformation includes all the shortened forms of information, such as abstracts, content summaries, or even tables of contents. This type of metainformation gives us a quick glance at what a work is about and allows us to consider many different sources without having to go through them completely.

Evaluative metainformation includes all the types that provide some judgment or analysis of content. This type includes recommendations, ratings, reviews, and commentaries. Even the search results order of pages from a search engine like Google represents a type of evaluative metainformation, since pages are ranked in part by the number of other pages linked to them (and hence "voting" for them in some sense).

And, of course, these two types can be combined, resulting in the best form of metainformation, providing us with a quick overview and some evaluation of the value. An examples would be a World Wide Web yellow pages or directory which describes each selected site and provides evaluations of its content.

Indicators of Lack of Credibility

You can sometimes tell by the tone, style, or competence of the writing whether or not the information is suspect. Here are a few clues:

• Anonymity
• Lack of Quality Control
• Negative Metainformation. If all the reviews are critical, be careful.
• Bad grammar or misspelled words. Most educated people use grammar fairly well and check their work for spelling errors. An occasional split infinitive or comma in the wrong place is not unusual, but more than two or three spelling or grammar errors is cause for caution, at least. Whether the errors come from carelessness or ignorance, neither puts the information or the writer in a favorable light.