Tag Archives: credibility

Renovating everything, including the internet information…

The assigned reading was very interesting to read, simply because it is relevant to current events. The criteria used to judge a site’s credibility isn’t the same as years ago. When I first entered college, I remember being told that .org, .gov, and .edu sites were pretty credible and accepted to be used in papers. However, although some are still credible, there are more criteria that are looked at. One of these is mentioned in the list of the five mutations. I also enjoyed how they utilized the word mutations. The internet has definitely mutated to fit into today’s world. The fact that constancy and permanency is no longer the goal and, updating, revising, and correcting are the goals, is something good to hear. I have noticed in my journey to write my research papers for this semester, that journals and articles are likely to have a “revised xx” somewhere on it. To me this is better because it shows that someone found mistakes and edited it or took the time to do further research regarding the topic. We can’t really blame anyone for thinking the permanency of an article to be important. Remember, editing printed information is more difficult than editing an electronic source.

Journal on Library vs Internet.

I performed a search for “data brokers” using Google and a couple of relevant results did float to the top.  I had to sift through a lot of questionable websites because they didn’t have an author or too strong of a bias, which brought their credibility into question. Another reason I doubted their credibility was because they weren’t really backing up their statements with any data or research.   While on the other hand when I used EBSCO there was less skepticism on my part when looking at the results, mainly because a lot of creditable information floated to the top.  While using EBSCO I did refine the search by adding privacy to one of the subject fields to make the search more specific.  I did find about a couple similar articles between the internet search and the library database search but about two of the results had a pay wall while using the internet search engine, the library database search allowed me to bypass a couple of pay walls since it was linked to the school’s account.

Open Access to Any Information

Open data is a dream, and not a healthy one. Access to any possible information at any time for everyone for free will bring more problems than benefits. People just try not think about it deep, but for real – copyrighting, credibility, responsibilities from the both sides (users and contributors), hosting and many other moments are making the idea utopian. Moreover, same way as a gender gradation in wiki blogging I, personally, do not consider open data very seriously. Today it is not that important who posted more articles – men or women, same as for what information people has full access to. Right now we are living in an era of political, economical, financial and ecological crisis, that can easily end not in a good way for all of us. And this is showing us how regular people can’t deal with all presented information, even with limited data available, where facts presented nice and simple, regular users can’t see bright and are staying frustrated, which for example, can cost  life for seven shuttle crew members.