An Overview of "Lateral Reading"
Let’s begin by watching the following two videos from Mike Caulfield, whose done a lot of work on evaluating and fact-checking online sources. These videos provide a quick overview of the kind of work we’ll do.
This first video illustrates the importance of evaluating sources through something called “lateral reading” (when evaluating a website, looking at what others have said about that page, rather than relying primarily on what the site says about itself)
Online Verification Skills: Introductory Video (3:13)
Now that we’ve looked at how lateral reading is especially important in today’s online environments, we’ll see how the presenter, Mike Caulfield, puts lateral reading into action.
One caveat before watching video 2:When researching contentious topics, especially topics that are new or about which less research has been done, you’ll often need to do more work than this video suggests (for example, current political debates like Medicare for All). ...And a note about Wikipedia:You may have heard in the past that you should avoid Wikipedia as a source. We (like Caulfield) will instead encourage you to use Wikipedia, but to do so while recognizing both its strengths and its limitations. Most Wikipedia articles are highly accurate, as Wikipedia has editors who work to ensure that Wikipedia content adheres is its editorial practices, including providing evidentiary sources. Wikipedia articles that are longer and that are older tend to be of higher quality because they have been developed and improved over time by individuals who follow Wikipedia's best practices. That said, it's still true that someone can put inaccurate information on Wikipedia that is not immediately corrected. Wikipedia articles that are about contentious topics and that are undeveloped should be evaluated with greater care. You can also use the references at the end of a Wikipedia page to help you determine its level of accuracy. |
Online Verification Skills: Investigate the Source (2:44)
In the next section we’ll introduce you to an approach to investigating sources more deeply: SIFT (Four Moves).
CC-BY-NC-SA
This guide was created by Andrea Baer and Dan Kipnis at Rowan University and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA).
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