Quality is Hard to Come By

I don't know about you but have you ever felt like this lady in the picture above? Do you feel like there is so much information needed to be piled through to find the highest quality that it is impossible?

I know I personally have felt this way many of times! Then, after I found high quality information, how was I supposed to know if it really was high quality or not? Especially in todays world of technological advances it is hard to distinguish between good and bad quality. There are so many things that can determine the quality strength of a piece of information: the website, the author, the publishing year, the editor, the list goes on and on.

You also have to take into account just pure "word of mouth." Some people will tell you for days and days how Wikipedia is filled with false information; however, for everything I have looked at on Wikipedia it has been truthful. I think the internet today is where the biggest disagreement between good and bad quality comes into play. We need to access all the things in the list above to initially decide the strength of the information's quality.

What are some things that you have come across when looking for concrete information? Do you think the internet has positively or negatively influenced information quality?

Wikipedia - the Answer to Everything

For most of us all we do is continually hear from our teachers starting in the first grade is, "Do not use Wikipedia as a source or to answer your questions, it is all false information." If Wikipedia is all false, then why do so many people continue to refer to its articles and add information to its' pages? 

I personally think Wikipedia is good in confirming or maybe clearing up information that you have already learned; however, it is definitely not something you should go to as your first source of knowledge. From my experience I have seen that Wikipedia is reliable the majority of the time, but i would never go to it to learn about a subject that was foreign to me. 

http://www.davidglarson.com/teamwork/what-caused-wikipedias-decline/

The picture above is obviously poking fun at Wikipedia. They are showing that it is so easy to edit in and delete information that even your cat could do it. It is true that anyone can go into an article and change and add different things; however, I do not think that people intentionally add false information or take out true information. 

It is always a good thing to really look at the "information quality" of any site you look up on the internet. As most of us know you do not have to be a genius to make a website and claim your information as credible. Growing up in this Digital error, we have definitely grown in our skills for distinguishing between false and credible information. 

I think that we need to be more aware of figuring out what information we should turn to the internet to find and when we should look to other more credible sources. We have so many other things such as peer-reviewed journals, encyclopedias and dictionaries to aid us in finding out new information or clarifying old information. I would agree that Wikipedia has its faults, but then again what on the internet does not these days?