Reliability of Information on the Web
Posted to Google and the World of Search on 5 December 2005, 10:51 AM EST
Given the current obsession with the reliability (or more often in media coverage, the unreliability) of information on the web—the New York Times weighed in on the matter yesterday, and USA Today carried a scathing op-ed last week—I feel lucky that an article Roy Rosenzweig and I wrote entitled "Web of Lies? Historical Information on the Internet" happens to appear today in First Monday. If you're interested in the subject, it's probably best to read the full article, but I'll provide a quick summary of our argument here.Using my H-Bot software tool, Roy and I scanned the Internet to assess the quality of online information about history. In short, we found that while critics are correct that there are many error-riddled web pages, on the whole the web presents a relatively sound portrayal of historical facts through a process of consensus. With the right tools, these facts can be extracted from the web, leaving the more problematic web pages aside.
Moreover, this process of historical data mining on the web should prompt further discussion about the significance of all of this historical information online. To do some of our own prompting, we had a special multiple-choice test-taking version of H-Bot take the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History exam using nothing but the web and some fancy algorithms borrowed from computer science. [Spoiler alert: it passed.] This raises new questions that move far beyond simple debates over the reliability of information on the web and into the very nature of teaching, learning, and research in our digital age.
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