Stop and Investigate
The first two moves for evaluating online information are the most important: stop and investigate.
Stop
Before you read or share something you find online, stop. Check your gut. Does the headline elicit a strong emotional reaction? Pay attention to that. While you’re at it, ask yourself if you know the source of the information, and if you know their reputation. If it is a website, do you recognize the organization behind it? If it’s an individual, do you know who they are? If not, move on to the next step.
Investigate
Investigate the information source before you read it. This is the practice of lateral reading that the Stanford study’s fact-checkers relied on. Leave the information source and look it up. For this, you can just add Wikipedia.
Just Add Wikipedia
Watch this short video of Mike Caulfield explaining how to just add Wikipedia.
How to just add Wikipedia:
- Copy the source url from the start of the url to the end of the domain (e.g., .com, .org, etc.). Do not include the slash after the domain.
- Paste the url into your search bar. Add a space and then type “Wikipedia” after the url.
- Find the relevant Wikipedia page and scan it. Ask yourself a few questions:
- Is this source what I thought it was?
- Is there anything about this source that makes it unfit as a source?
- Does this source have the expertise to provide original, authoritative reporting on the topic?
If you don’t find a Wikipedia page for a source, take note. Most major news organizations will have a Wikipedia page. One that doesn’t could be fringe and unreliable.