If It's on the Internet, It must be True

A couple of days ago, my nine-year-old arrived home from school full of excitement. “There's this website I have to show you, mom,” he cried.

Mentally I groaned, thinking I was going to have to see some obscure piece of Lego weaponry or yet another video of exploding Coke and Mentos. “Okay,” I replied reluctantly. “You have to go to www.allaboutexplorers.com, and click on Christopher Columbus,” he continued. Once there I found the following:

Christopher Columbus was born in 1951 in Sydney, Australia. His home was on the sea and Christopher longed to become an explorer and sailor. However, as a young man, Christopher went to Portugal and got involved in the map making business with his brother, Bartholomew. This business made Columbus a rich man. His books of maps are still found today in every library in the world.

I started laughing and Nico joined in, unable to contain himself at the joke. “There was a teacher who read this to her class, and only one kid, one kid in the whole school realized it couldn't be true, Mom,” he said proudly.

“Well,” I told him, “you know how I always tell you: 'If it's on the Internet, it must be true'.” "I'm really glad your librarian showed this to you,” I added. “The Internet is a great resource but you have to be sure that any website you use is a reliable one.”

I kept thinking about this example of a teacher getting kids to think about sources they find on the web, and it made me realize that the Internet has simply writ large a problem that has always existed.

While I sympathize to some degree with teachers who don't want kids just to go to Wikipedia to do all their research and forget how to use a book, I also don't agree with those teachers who simply ban the use of Wikipedia altogether.

With all its flaws, Wikipedia is a monument, not just to collective knowledge, but to the collective regulation of knowledge, that has not been equaled since Diderot and his fellow philosophes conceived of the Encyclopedie. With its constant updating and editorial self-review, the Wikipedia is probably the most peer-reviewed resource on the planet, and one with the capacity to add new sources of knowledge at a rate faster than any other published source.

Rather than telling kids not to use this resource, Wikipedia offers a great place to begin discussing why some sources are more reliable than others and why good research has to go beyond any encyclopedia to be sufficiently extensive.

Beyond Wikipedia, the Internet offers phenomenal resources for research as many libraries continue to put primary sources online, some in facsimile formats, that allow students to get to information that otherwise would require extensive preparation and the expense of travel. For elementary and middle school kids, the most important part of using the Internet is having teachers set up the right kind of portal with pre-selected websites, while high school students can be given tools to help them evaluate the reliability of a website on their own.

At the same time, for those who bemoan that Internet research is replacing a trip to the local library, it's a good idea to remember that just because something is published in a book is no guarantee that it's necessarily the truth.

Michael Bellesiles' Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in History before subsequent scholars began re-examining the validity of his research and thus questioning the basis for this arguments. As a 2002 Emory University Report of the Investigative Committee in the matter of Professor Michael Bellesile finally put it: “[T]he best that can be said of his work with the [historical] record is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed.”

How many students used this highly praised book published by the respected Columbia University Press for their research before it was shown to be “deeply flawed” is anyone's guess. But it does demonstrate that the old adage, “don't judge a book by its cover” should be extended to cover the awards on its jacket and the blurbs on the back.

In fact, some of the most interesting research that I've done myself has stemmed from uncovering primary sources that have been obscured, falsified, or marked as “unreadable” by a book that cites them. For example, Lilian Faderman in her famous work on “romantic friendship” between women in the 18th and 19th century argued that no one ever suspected such friendships to be “lesbian” in character because sexual relations between women were unimaginable at the time.

But much of what Faderman came across as “sources” were works that had been “cleaned up” or even censored by Victorian editors. Her most famous example was a celebrity couple, the Ladies of Llangollen, who ran away as teenagers and spent the rest of their adult lives living together. Their “friendship” was widely idealized at the time, and they received visits from many famous politicans and writers in their day who never publicly stated that there was anything untoward in their domestic arrangements. But in their diaries, the comments could be much less polite. Hester Thrale Piozzi wrote in the manuscript version of her diary that the ladies were in fact “damned sapphists,” a contemporary term for “lesbian,” and a reference that was deliberately left out when her diaries were published years later.

The point is that whether a source exists in cyberspace or on the shelves of the local library or bookstore, we should never take the information we find for granted. Whenever possible, we need to educate our children to seek out the primary sources that others use to build a narrative about an historical event, or a set of medical data, or a social phenomenon like women joining the work force. What they find there may reinforce or it may undermine the narrative they've been reading, but the more they understand the relation between primary sources and the secondary source that builds on them, the better they will be at evaluating the books and web sites they use and thinking about them critically.

Which brings me full circle to my son and his “not really all about explorers” website. “How did you know that the information on Christopher Columbus was false?” I asked him. First he rolled his eyes at me. Then he said, “Well if Columbus sailed in 1492, he couldn't have been born in 1951, could he? He'd, like, have to be 500 years old!”

“Exactly,” I replied. A little arithmetic and some common sense goes a long way when you're researching. A little skepticism doesn't hurt either.

And you've read this on the Internet, so it must be true.