Finding Trustworthy Sources

If you’ve been to school in the past decade or two, especially in high school or middle school, you’ve been told not to use Wikipedia as a source for a paper or research project. It makes sense; anybody can edit it, publish an article, or delete content from it. Over the years plenty of teachers have told horror stories of students trying to use Wikipedia as a source only for the entire page to have been messed with so not a single fact was true. I think it might even be an urban legend among teachers at this point. I’ve also seen posts on social media of people editing little pieces of Wikipedia articles, slowly, over time, like enlarging a state on an image of a map without changing any of the surrounding states, in the hopes that nobody notices until it’s obvious. So, it’s something we all know don’t trust Wikipedia for “official” sources. You can use it for a jumping off point, but don’t put it in a bibliography.

 

But what sites can you trust? You’ve probably heard that websites that end in .org are more reliable than ones that end in .com or .net, but this isn’t necessarily true. Anybody can get a .org domain for their website, which can be used for any purpose. Some people will use the borrowed credibility to their advantage and run scams or misinformation through their websites. Just because it’s supposed to be more reputable, doesn’t mean it is.

 

Another domain people tend to think of for trustworthy domains is a .gov site. As the domain suggests, a .gov page belongs to the government. Sometimes, if the site is for a specific state in the US, it’ll include that state’s initials in the domain. So a New York website would be “.ny.gov.” IN a similar vein, countries other than the US have country codes in place of the .gov domain, such as Canada having .ca as it’s domain. (I don’t know if this means the US-government sites have a country code when accessed from other countries.) Now, you can trust .gov websites as along as you trust whatever government is behind them. Politics will obviously color anyone’s views of what is trustworthy and what isn’t.

 

My preferred method of finding articles I trust is to use a database if I can, or to find a website that has a good reputation. I used to use Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) when I was in high school but have since become rather fond of JSTOR. JSTOR does have the problem that you need to be affiliated with an educational institution, though, so it isn’t available to everyone. If you already have a school email, then you probably also have access to a school library or database, as well. Everyone can use Google Scholar, though.