Actually, I don't peruse the Internet as thoroughly I should, and I subscribe to a limited amount of sources. For news I put my trust in CNN.com. For tips on health, I look up information on WebMD, and for trivia on movies, I use The Internet Movie Database. I like renowned news corporations and general databases. When asking a simple, honest question, I want a simple, honest answer - but from a source that is otherwise dense. A more thorough investigation of things is undertaken by someone who knows what he is seeking, or he learns along the way through the right paths of dense research.
This past week, at my internship at an online magazine, I had my first experience in thorough investigation for editing, or, to put it less imposingly, for simple fact checking. When the editor asked me to check all the dates, names, and places mentioned in an article I suddenly doubted everything. I was like the Christian disciple Peter who, after taking a few steps across the water surface towards his Lord, suddenly sinks below (Fear not, my skepticism extends to religion - I am merely making an allusion).
The article mentioned the Ku Klux Klan organization, whose repulsive creed is ethnic white supremacy, and it was necessary for me to look up details of their history. When I typed the name into the Google search engine, what appears prominently is the KKK home page. Here I realized what it means to me for a website to be credible or not.
http://www.kkk.com/
It's not statistics or facts that give me pause, but tone. I can neither confirm nor deny new information that is presented to me, but passionate and sensational words can make me suspicious immediately. On the aforementioned page I read "A message of love not hate", "stay firm in your convictions", and "regain a sense of loyalty." The abstract words are weighty but the information is not dense. And honestly, the KKK site is as sophisticated as their ideas. Look how innocent they try to seem! And it is precisely the impassioned innocence that incites my distrust. I wanted history, not creed. I wanted a cold record, not a heated manifesto.
Here might be the more proper website for researching Ku Klux Klan history:
http://www.history.com/topics/ku-klux-klan
At first glance it might seem boring, but now I feel so reassured by the amount of plain black text and colorless words. Furthermore, I am impressed with the variety of information that's immediately apparent. The home page of CNN.com too is filled with all kinds of headlines, not a self-glorifying statement of purpose on high moral ground. I am more inclined to trust the monotone of an anchorman on the BBC over the raving of a political or religious demagogue.
When looking for answers on non-fiction websites, the most important thing to consider is the source and not only where he stands, but where he comes from.
Consider http://answers.yahoo.com
This is a kind of database with a very general audience - namely anyone with a keyboard, preferably those with an account on Yahoo. Although one can easily ask a question, the answers are given by sources you can doubt even more quickly than you could a passionate orator. Here, there is no guise of affiliation, organization, or creed. And so I find that the reverse is true - the absence of passion and affiliation can also give us cause to doubt. We need more than a good tone and a well-dressed appearance. We need to ascertain who it is answering.
One night it so happened that my friend and I wanted to know the exact original text of the phrase "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, which was quoted by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer upon a test drop of the atomic bomb. Here was the end of our investigation:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100415015133AACk2Eb
The first answer is credible, and notice that it's also both the most dense and the least passionate of the answers. I resonate again with the even tone and specific information. The final answer points out the humor of the ignorantly worded question, which my friend and I thoroughly appreciated. Finding answers also depends on who is asking the questions for you.
Here is another kind of question and answer database:
http://about.com
The difference here is that the answer section of About.com, unlike Yahoo's commons, is populated with professional writers rather than the public (Yahoo is supported by professional writers, but not in that general forum). Perhaps the answers are more limited (well-written answers are harder to come by, what with the need of thorough investigations), but I can tell it's credible not only because of clues like density, organization, and fair knowledge, but because of the sources themselves. We trust CNN and IMDB not only because of the tone and thoroughness, but also simply because these names are reputable. They are backed by professionals (as in the former) and by consensus (as in the latter).
In the infinity of the Internet, my own skepticism is what serves me, my creed on non-conviction. "I neither believe nor disbelieve in anything" someone once told me. Credible or not, on the Internet, you get what you ask for, depending on who you ask and how you ask.
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