On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Harshwardhan Nagaonkar wrote:
Exactly. I gave an entire presentation to a class just to underline this fact. Everyone seems to mistrust Internet sources, but how accurate are those journals which are funded by private sources? And those which acquire revenue from writing about products/things (who are advertised in their same "book"/"hardcopy paper" medium)?
The thing I like about the Internet is that I'm able to see many different views almost instantaneously. If I'm researching, say, giraffes, I can look at two dozen web sites on giraffes in a very short amount of time. I can double-check, triple-check, and quadruple-check every piece of information I get from those sites to make sure they all match. If I'm particularly concerned, I can even find dead-tree references so that I can look up studies on giraffes in the local library later on that match the same information I'm seeing on the web sites.
I think if you do your research *properly* (i.e. by not treating some teenager's web site as "authoritative" just because it says something about giraffes [and likewise regarding wikipedia or some professor's web site with similar skepticism], but using those sites more as you would a card catalog--to find primary and secondary sources), you can get even more accurate information off the Internet in the same amount of time spent cracking books in the HBLL.
I think the Internet is also useful because it teaches people that just because something says something doesn't mean it's true--eventually you see people extend that same sort of skepticism and demand for corroboration and evidence to information broadcast through the more traditional channels.
Of course, simply because the information is repeated often on a lot of web sites doesn't make it any more true--that's not what I'm saying. But (a) many of the misinformation found on the Internet could be easily found to be false by a simple Google search, and (b) even dead-tree material isn't immune to this sort of thing, q.v. "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone" by Stephen Jay Gould.
~ Ross
--
This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.
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