RELIABLE OR NOT RELIABLE?

Hi everybody!!!!! Just to let you know that I'm exhausted because I've been sitting in front of the pc since two hours and at the end of my work all my post content disappeared. Wow great, I'm very lucky today!!!!! So, let's begin it for the second time... No technological tool to comment about this time....:( Anyway, I think that evaluating an online source is very important since we are always faced with a huge quantity of information and can’t expect all of them to be reliable.

I first met the difficulty of evaluating a website when I had to write my paper for the University degree. I wrote it all in English and it was about Tandem learning so my whole bibliography laws in English. At the beginning I was discouraged by the fact that I couldn’t find the author of a great number of articles which gave me important ideas on the topic of my interest. The were often articles published online but without a precise origin, which might have been for example a well-known newspaper or organization. Then, my supervisor suggested me some tips to follow for a good research and step by step, after a hard work I got it.
I, myself, usually concentrate the attention on the title of an online source to see if it may meet my content needs. But, I soon realized that most of the time titles are there to catch readers’ attention and in the end they don’t satisfy your expectations.
The author is undoubtedly an important element for judging an online source. Many times this may be anonymous or may not appear so, as suggested in the articles I read, it is useful to investigate what we know about the organization which might have substituted the author. In this way we may test the credibility of the source. Furthermore, an aid is offered usually by the small word ‘edu’ which appears together with the URL and identifies the sponsoring institution as an educational institution. This is especially useful when we are supposed to do an academic research and the data must obviously be of extreme credibility.
I usually tend to believe to newspapers articles and online news, when I’m supposed to make a research. But, reading the articles suggested, I realized that also here we must pay attention on the quality of information given. Sometimes, newspapers can be very one-sided and try to persuade people with their own truth with no acknowledgements of others viewpoints.
A thing I leave out when judging an online source is the date. I make a mistake here because it is fundamental to know when the site was last updated in order to avoid to take out very old pieces of information.
In the end I would mention the look of the source. In my opinion the structure, the content, the context, completeness and accuracy of information has undoubtedly a great role in evaluating a web source. It is surely more reliable a source containing a list of references or citations that look as if they will lead you to related material that would be good sources. In this way you have a further proof of the seriousness and credibility of the content proposed.
On the other side, when I have to evaluate a source which is not related with academic writing, let’s imagine YouTube videos I click on just for fun, I particularly pay attention on peer rating. The stars showing people’s preferences for a video or another are really not to be left out if we don’t want to waste our time in watching nonsense.

In the end I would say that in our information age, where we are bombard by an enormous number of information we should be critical and know how to sift them in the more appropriate way in order to meet our purposes.