Can You Trust The Internet?

[ritu 1]

Do you trust the information that is available on the internet? One of the primary reasons for people clinging to the internet is to find information.But how many of us, in essence, believe that the information obtained is worth relying?Some of the surveys conducted recently have shown that people somehow find it difficult to go by the data that is uploaded over the internet.A few of the probable reasons could be the priority given to the factor of promotion. Even if we consider the examples of well known informative sites, the data doesn't seem to be updated. Also, there could be chances of misuse of information disclosed over the internet and the internet and the internet and the hardware concerned could also face security issues.However, the professional networking sites could be in a better state, as filling up inaccurate information could invite a trouble from one's previous employer.Talking about myself, I normally do resort to the internet for finding suitable information, but there have been instances where two sites give out varied information and all I am left with is confusion. Though I can't rule out the fact that i have received useful information from the internet quite a few times, still there is an element of suspicion that prevails.What do you guys feel about the reliability of the internet?

[Quatrux 4]

I think you cannot trust the information on the Internet. Internet is full of lies and false information and in different websites you can find different things about the same thing.But still, I use Internet information... But in some way, I don't trust that information.Sometimes you can't even trust people with information. For example, one doctor can tell you to do that and that for you to get healthy, another doctor could tell you a different story, even maybe opposite, so which doctor to trust? They could both have two different articles put on the Internet. Well, I at least know they think they're right :DIt's really hard with the information reliability, but in my opinion there are no alternatives, as books and other data can also be not reliable as the Internet, so I think that people should trust things in some kind of level or even layer and deal with false and good information. Some resources are more reliable, while other aren't so reliable. In the university, all the pHD's says that you can't trust wikipedia and you have to not quote it, but usually wikipedia has references which you can lookup and quote.There can be a book on some event, which was written with lies. Other people also write about that event and they quote that book and in 30 years you see that a lot of books are based on that first book which had a lot of false information, so are all those book not reliable? In some way yes, but people still believe it's true information if it's in a book or on the Internet even though reference is really not reliable and false? The problem is that information can be manipulated, sometimes I don't know which news to trust and which can be total bulls*it...

Edited July 20, 2012 by Quatrux (see edit history)

[ritu 1]

I agree on what you say about books that they are not reliable to the fullest.There has been engaging debates over the authenticity of the facts mentioned even in the Bible, some of the examples can be well found on this forum also.Actually, all the sources of information are developed by the human mind itself,so it is much prone to contain errors.Moreover, what happens is that if more than one authors contribute to a single source, it is likely to carry all of their varied views and result in confusing the reader.

[sharmiladevi 0]

Even I don’t think that we can fully rely on it, I actually wanted to know about the Lokpal Bill and when browsing through it, I got information that in 1982, Lokpal Bill was implemented in Singapore and 142 corrupt ministers were arrested in one day… and in other sight it was mentioned that this information was fake and this misinformation was meticulously planned and generated to help these campaigns….. my head started to swirl….from that day onwards, believe me, I never touched about Lokpal Bill….I also agree that even books are not the complete reliable source of information…take for example any epic stories, same story with different authors will be fed with different information…I still remember playing a game in my college days by passing a sentence through different persons and finally how funny the statement will be, it was actually an exercise given by our personality development teacher to emphasize on the fact that how the information gets modified when it is passed through many number of people…. It is true….

[Bikerman 2]

You need high-level filtering skills to be able to use the internet reliably. Unfortunately most people do not possess these skills and that is a problem.Such skills includei. the ability to recognise good and bad sources of informationii. double or triple checking data; spotting fallacies and composition errorsiii. checking references and citations properlyWithout such skills the user is floundering around in the dark and is easy prey for those who would mislead.

[demonboy1990 0]

the information on the internet is not always true but some information is great i use wikipedia nearly every day if i want to findout about something, but take any information you get from the internet and check it more than once if possible go to different siteswhere the same subject is being discused and make sure the site is not run by the same people but most information on the internet is true so far as it has being provided in so form including mouth, books, videos, movies etc, most information is true but some is not.

[ritu 1]

As Bikerman has listed, some skills have to be possessed in this regard, and efforts have to be made to check if a piece of information is valid. However I feel that another crucial factor that has to be taken into consideration is updating some piece of information that has been posted quite some time ago. If we belong to that particular field, and are in touch with the latest happenings in that field and can always try them ourselves, but the real problem arises when a newbie in the field tries to get information and whatever he is served with is outdated, and later finds that out, it shakes the trust over the source on the internet.Every site that gives out information on the internet should keep up with the changing trends in the field and incorporate them in their material, that would help immensely to the spread of proper information.

[demonboy1990 0]

it is required now in my country to put a notice informing the user that the site uses cookies and you can accept or refuse.its annoying really since it takes a while getting used to.

[jlhaslip 4]

It is critical that you consider the source of the information you are looking at.As an example, the information from an 'expert' or 'academic' would care more weight than information posted by some high school drop-out (unless the topic was about where the best place to spend an afternoon at the beach, if you get my drift).As for trusting the Interweb with respect to personal information, a good guideline would be to never put information on the Interweb that you do not want your Grandmother to see, because she will have access to it... guaranteed.

[sheepdog 10]

I find a lot of information online to be pure BS. Especially when what you are reading is conjecture and also, well endowed with personal opinions. It is so bad as a matter of fact, that recently a new company has started that is designed to protect your business and personal reputation on line from people who for whatever reason have a vendetta against you. There are just some people in the world that no matter what you do you can't please them, and this type of person loves to attack you in whatever way they possibly can to cause you grief. And then there are the so called experts who read a few books and suddenly decide they know everything there is about some particular subject, wether they actually have any real life experience with their chosen subject. I actually got into a pretty good argument one time with an idiot who told me in no uncertain terms he knew more about Komondor Livestock Guard dogs than I did because he had read all about them and I had only raised them for 30 years. And let me tell you, no matter how hard you try to explain things, you really just can't fix stupid. Any time I want to research how to do something online, I read at least 3 or more articules written by different people, and try to use a little common sense and find a balance between all the different points of view. This way, at least with general information you can get a better idea of how things are usually or generally done. There are some pretty radical ideas out there that just don't work for everybody, even if they did work by some fluke of luck for the person writting the articule.

[ritu 1]

I would agree that sometimes it does happen that you have got sound experience about something, and someone else has got experience of different quality about the same thing, lets say marriage, there are so many people that maintain varied views on the same concept and a person who is dissatisfied with his own marriage takes the effort of sharing his unpleasant experiences through the medium of a book. If that is considered as source of some level of information, about marriage, is that not going to create a false notion among he readers who expect some sound advice on the marital bond?However, there are certain things like personal experiences that should be, even if counted as information, should be well verified with one's own senses and power of reasoning.

[fermin25 3]

If the creator of this topic is talking about sites like wikipedia I can give you my opinion. Sites like Wikipedia are most trustful than the text books. I could see this a lot of times. For example, when I am studying my text books have a lot of information that simply doesn´t have any sense although it apparently is impossible. For that reason I like to read all the articles of wikipedia related with the part of my books that I am studying and make a comparison. In the most of cases I can say that wikipedia information is better organizated and equal updated like text books.I know there is a lot of people that have a lot of fear about the information uploaded to the internet and by this reason you have to make a little comparison between different online sources and offline sources too depending of your doubts about the information fidelity. The internet nowadays is open to almost all the people with a computer the difference maybe is the connection speed but this isn´t a factor that make influence in information.The internet will always have a grade of bad information because is open to all the people but I think that we don´t have to fall in paranoia because all you have to do if you have some fear about the reliability of the information is compare two or more websites to be a higher level of trust in the info.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

If the creator of this topic is talking about sites like wikipedia I can give you my opinion. Sites like Wikipedia are most trustful than the text books. I could see this a lot of times. For example, when I am studying my text books have a lot of information that simply doesn´t have any sense although it apparently is impossible. For that reason I like to read all the articles of wikipedia related with the part of my books that I am studying and make a comparison. In the most of cases I can say that wikipedia information is better organizated and equal updated like text books.
I know there is a lot of people that have a lot of fear about the information uploaded to the internet and by this reason you have to make a little comparison between different online sources and offline sources too depending of your doubts about the information fidelity. The internet nowadays is open to almost all the people with a computer the difference maybe is the connection speed but this isn´t a factor that make influence in information.

The internet will always have a grade of bad information because is open to all the people but I think that we don´t have to fall in paranoia because all you have to do if you have some fear about the reliability of the information is compare two or more websites to be a higher level of trust in the info.

I'm going to agree with the Wikipedia stuff. A massive difference between books and Wikipedia is that while books cite their information as well, it's usually much harder to find information (as you then have to find the books). With Wikipedia, though, you simply click the link beside the information and you're instantly taken to the source.

There's also the benefit of Wikipedia being edited by millions of people, whereas books have a writer or two and editors. You basically have to trust that the book's author(s) interpreted the information they read properly, as well as put it into their own words properly. With Wikipedia, and the ability to make edits, it opens the doors for others to give their own input.

And lastly, there's also the difference between updated information and non-updated. With traditional books, information can't be updated without new book releases. With Wikipedia, things can be added in real-time as they're happening.

Overall, regardless of the format there's definitely going to be a lot of bias, but I think the more people that are contributing to something, the less bias there is when looking at it as a big picture.

[Iniyila 2]

Trusting information available on the net is not easy, you should always try to find reliable sources then you trust them, for me as i'm a student in our university we always try to get correct information from reliable articles in reliable journals, for finding this we always check the "impact factor" of a journal and decide whether it is reliable or not. it is very important that even in academic places information you find may be unreliable, in some articles from some conferences you can find lots of incorrect information ! and this is why we even can't trust articles published in conferences, in journals there is more supervision and you can trust them more easily but as i said again not all of journals are creditable and you should always check for values like impact factor if you want to see how much reliable that journal is.So what do you think about information on websites ? they can easily be wrong because there is no guarantee that those information are correct, most of the articles you find on internet is just a copy paste of a source, in some you can find the source in the end of article but in most of them you can't even know where those info comes from. so trusting what you read on internet is not easy at all, the first method i suggest is to read reliable sources, there are some reliable source for everything you want, like for beginning web programming w3schools is now a complete reliable source. finding a reliable source for every work is not hard at all, you just need to ask somewhere like here , there are many peoples that know some good resources and if you ask in a social place like this forum you can find some, so always before trusting your readings on internet first be sure that those information are from a reliable source and not fake.The second method when you can't find a reliable source is to searching for different articles with same meaning, when you search for example "how to bake bread ?" you will find some results. in those many of them are just a copy paste of eachother and are completely same but some of them are different, so start reading those different ones and you will find a procedure for baking bread in each of them now there will be a similarity between all of them about how you can bake a bread and of course some differences. now if you don't know whether the resources are reliable or not you can tell that the similar procedure which is in the most of your findings seems to be correct but you can not judge about the differences between them and maybe some of them are true and some are false but at least you can find something which seems to be true.And in the end i should say you can never say something is completely correct or incorrect because even when scientists say something like saying carrot is good for eyes you can not expect this sentence to be true for ever because maybe some years later some other scientists conclude that sentence was incorrect. so first try to find reliable resources and if you didn't find out try to find different articles about same thing and then find similarities between them. and remember to not trust internet for everything, if you want to buy a software for burning discs you can trust reviews on the net but if you want to loose weight then i suggest you to go to doctor because it is your health and it is dangerous to trust things you read on internet.So i can say internet is completely trustable in many things and untrustable in many other things, but with help of it we can find our answers a lot easier and faster.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Trusting information available on the net is not easy, you should always try to find reliable sources then you trust them, for me as i'm a student in our university we always try to get correct information from reliable articles in reliable journals, for finding this we always check the "impact factor" of a journal and decide whether it is reliable or not. it is very important that even in academic places information you find may be unreliable, in some articles from some conferences you can find lots of incorrect information ! and this is why we even can't trust articles published in conferences, in journals there is more supervision and you can trust them more easily but as i said again not all of journals are creditable and you should always check for values like impact factor if you want to see how much reliable that journal is.

Finding "reliable" sources can be hard too though. There have been news reports that were found to be false, due to people making up stories and feeding them to journalists. Many people find the news outlets (like CNN, FOX, etc.) as being reliable sources, but it really all boils down to how far they investigate things.

I take any information I find with a grain of salt. Anything can be faked, and anything can be real. There's even been scientific journals that have been proven wrong in the past.