Why Credibility ? | What you shouldn't miss | Working across Time Zones | Acknowledgements
Why 'Credibility' ?
The internet, we all know, is notoriously unreliable. It is also the premier source of information in both the developed and the developing world. This makes the question of credibility of web based information very important. As students, we constantly refer to the internet for information.
But can we trust what we read on the net ? Are online searches trustworthy?
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The Time magazine named “You” as Person of the Year for 2006, in recognition of the change heralded by user generated content on the internet. In today’s world of crowdsourcing; blogs, wikis, amateur videos and social networking portals are becoming a major way of communicating and spreading information. Is such information reliable? After all, today’s news reporter can be a high school kid or a housewife; in fact it can just be anyone. All it requires is a net connection and some time; one can update a blog, edit articles on Wikipedia, put up videos on Youtube and scrap people on Orkut, and information will be spread far and wide. Information has never been so cheap and more importantly, so quick and easy to obtain. |
For ThinkQuest 2007, we wanted to work on an issue that is of prime concern to today’s high schoolers and college goers. We asked around and the first thing that most people talked about was the trustworthiness of online information - can we cite Wikipedia in our school projects, should we believe stuff written on blogs, are Google’s search results biased, is it safe to use one’s debit card number to book movie tickets online, should we update our bank account information on the internet... the list goes on.
That’s why we decided to talk about the credibility of the web. After all, we students are connected to the internet almost all our waking hours, and what better platform than one of the top website design competitions, to talk about the credibility of websites itself.
We are the Credibles, and we’ll help you decide what information on the internet to believe in and what to dismiss as fake.
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