Using the internet as a study source has become very popular as online schools are popping up everywhere. You, as students at Insight School of Wisconsin, are using the internet daily for your school. Unlike brick and mortar schools, our school library is online. So, how do we know if these sources are credible? There are plenty of ways to determine the credibility of a website and if it’s really a good resource to use. One of the mainly used websites, especially for students, is Wikipedia.org. How many of you use Wikipedia? I know I do from time to time. This website, however, is not the best. It may have just about everything on there, but the information is not 100% credible. Let’s go into a bit more detail on this.

When you are at a website like Wikipedia, you are reading information that has been edited by people from all over the world. Some people could just go in there and write their life story under “George Washington” or “Hip Replacements.” Do you get what I’m saying? Wikipedia has a really great idea, but their information is not very credible. Let’s dig into some ways to determine whether the website you are using is credible or not.

STEP 1) Look to see if there is the name of an author who wrote the article, or created the website.

STEP 2) Make sure there is a “last date updated” date somewhere on the webpage. If there is not, you cannot be sure that the information is up-to-date or not. This is a very important part to the credibility of a website. You want information to be current.

STEP 3) Double check the information on each website, because if it is different on another website that has the same topic, you need to keep checking until a few websites have information that match. The more websites that list the same information, the more likely it is to be true information. Take for instance the life of George Washington. What if on one website it said his birthday was February 29^th and you went and put that information into your assignment. Your teacher would probably take off points for getting his birthday wrong because you did not check your sources. (His birthday is February 22^nd, 1732 by the way…just in case you were wondering.)

STEP 4) Check the URL of the website. If it ends in .com, it is a website by a company and is not very credible. If the website ends in .edu, .net, .org, or .gov, it is more likely to be credible because those are all organizations, educational programs and institutions, and the government. This is another very important part to the process of determining if your source is or isn’t credible.

These steps aren’t very difficult, are they? Try to get into the habit of going through these steps each time you use a website for your studies. They’re not too hard, really. You just need to get used to repeating them each time you need a website as a reference for your studies. Good luck on your studies!