Using Sources
Evaluating
Evaluating your sources is most important when you have taken information off the internet. The majority of site you will find online are unreliable. Remember, anyone can publish stuff to the web. Even nine year olds. Do you want to use a fifth grade paper as a source for your college class? Problems like this arise when the source of the information is not clearly identified by the researcher.
A good clue as to whether or not the site is reliable would be to look at the url, or as it's called now, uri. Uri's generally look like this: http://www.something.com/directory/page.html
though some can be intensely long. But the beginning, the part after the http:// and before the first / is the domain name of the site. If it says tenyroldbillyswebsiteonmolecularastronomy.com then it is probably a bogus site. The dot com's are problematic, because anyone can have them. If you see the extension .edu, or .gov, then you have a better chance of finding reliable information.
If looking at information from schools, marked by the (.edu) extension, make note of the school you are at. Not all schools are the same. The edu extension is used for primary schools as well as higher education. And Harvard is most likely a better resource than a technical or community college, and a college is better than Miss Smith's kindergartners online. But not necessarily. You need to look closely at their bibliography, or works cited list. Who are they quoting? Is that source reliable? Some findings may surprise you. On the web, you must always be skeptical.
