By Majid Bastami
When looking for information online, one must consider: Is a certain informational product guaranteed to be reliable and used to organize activities/make decisions just because it is published in a governmental site?
Nowadays due to the importance of internet sources among those who access them, it is sometimes assumed that anything that is found on the internet is reliable. However gathering information from the internet is not so simple; therefore we have outlined the reliability of certain internet sources and how you can use them.
Forums and chat rooms
Without a doubt the least reliable internet sources are forums and chat rooms. These sources are indeed the modern and online forms of oral conversations and friendly talk, and they are as reliable for leading a legal case and a bureaucratic claim as what your brother-in-law may say. This is especially true since neither the identities of the people who talk in the forums are known nor their knowledge or views about the subject. You can use forums and chat rooms to obtain further insight about a subject or get familiar with a variety of views and interests, but you should never use what people say in a forum or chat room as the basis for your decisions or actions - at least not until you verify them in a more reliable manner.
Blogs
Blogs are to some extent different and their reliability depends on the degree of reliability of their owner(s). It goes without saying that those blogs with unknown owners cannot be the basis for decisions and actions, but now there are very specialized and professional bloggers in different fields whose views on a topic have been the basis and criteria on which many people rely. Even some academic institutions have recently allowed their students to cite such sources as formal and reliable sources in their academic papers. However it is obvious that if we decide to use the information found in blogs as a reference for formal and bureaucratic purposes, first we have to have comprehensive knowledge about the references and the owner of the blog, and secondly we should make sure that the information and materials discussed in it are approved by qualified sources and that those sources validate the degree of reliability of the blog owner. Although this is not always simple, it is important to do so in order to use a blog as reliable blogs are good references and sources to use in order to get familiar with different subjects or to get insight on different views.
There is also a type of blog which is gradually becoming a norm in the world of web,which should be an exception among the other blogs. These days many semi-governmental or non-governmental institutions and some international authorities disclose the formal viewpoints of their organizations in the form of the blog discussions of their members. They usually first inform the public about an important and frequently-asked subject in the form of group blog discussions. The head individuals of the blog discloses their viewpoints to the public and gathers the viewpoints of their visitors through comments, polling, and other online tools and finally put the output of the discussion on the same blog as the formal viewpoint of that group. It is obvious that this group of blogs are completely formal in the specialized and authorized field of the group and their sanctions are formal. However generally these final sanctions will be published again in another section of the website of that organization whose purpose is to reflect this type of discussions so that any misuse will be prevented and they will be undoubtedly practical and formal.
Wikis, encyclopedias, ask-me's, and other online references
We have previously talked about the degree of reliability of an important reference like Wikipedia. The fact is that the world community has not yet recognized online sources with the ability for the public to post their information as a reliable source. It is also unlikely to recognize them in the future since several factors may distort the information in these sources and there is no formal reference to examine and control this form of information.
However these sources, if used at the beginning of the search and as a way for finding a brief introduction about a subject, are becoming more and more important. But it is not a good idea to solely rely on this information as a reliable source. If you want to use these types of sources, one logical method of doing so is by obtaining information from several sources and comparing their commonalties. If you find significant differences or there was a slight difference but in important matters, you should most likely forget about it and search for more reliable sources which may not be online.
However, there is a distinguishing point about online informational and reference sources. Some of theses sources are indeed an online copy of a reliable paper reference. It is obvious that such references have the same value and credit as the paper copy, if provided by the institution which is the owner of the paper copy which monitors the production and publication of it.
Governmental sites
Perhaps the biggest mistake made is that too much credit is given to the information found in governmental sites, even by specialized and professional individuals. This means that a material is considered reliable and accurate just because it is found in a governmental web site; assuming that normally governmental institutions (especially in the first world countries), put the most accurate and the latest information on their web sites. However it is important to note that you can find some instances of inaccurate, old, or contradicting information in these sites through a little searching. If that is so, how can we make sure that the information on these sites are reliable and correct?
We will talk about this in the next section.