The Internet – tricks and traps

Introduction

The Internet is basically a vast amount of material, which is both very comprehensive, very extensive, and very changing. As a result, there enormous variations in the quality of the material that is available on the Internet, particularly because of the lack of common rules of censure. Anyone wishing to do so can post just about anything on the web – bad material or good material, legal or illegal.

In order to use the Internet as an academic resource, the huge differences in quality necessitate some serious deliberation about what to look for and how to evaluate one’s search. Is the result of the search relevant? In other words: the result of the search – and the material to be used from the Internet – needs to be quality controlled.

This evaluation obviously goes for other kinds of material as well, such as books and periodicals, but it is particularly important when using material from the Internet because of the lack of “Internet standards”.

In the following we would like to introduce some criteria for evaluating material on the Internet. We are basically talking about some simple rules of thumb, such as ‘who, what, why, where and how’:

• Who are behind the material and in control of the content? Is it an apparently respectable institution, such as a university? Or is it a fourth grade school class that has posted their science project on the web?
• What people are responsible for the home page?
• What is the basis of the material?
• Does the owner of the home page have a certain political/ideological purpose with the resource?
• Is there a better alternative to the home page, for instance a book, or perhaps a better home page?

It is a general problem with the Internet that much of the “good stuff” is protected by copyrights and thus not available online, or only for a fee. This typically goes for articles in journals and for books, which of course need to be sold. As a result, Internet material can often be “second rate” unless produced directly for use on the web.

Search engines

Traps

The biggest danger of the Internet – when using web bases material for teaching of writing papers – is the fact that amateurs have free hands. Everyone is free to make his or her own home page, for instance about the Holocaust, without having the slightest knowledge about the subject or a professional training as an historian. Accordingly, it can be extremely difficult to tell whether information posted on the Internet is correct, incorrect, or perhaps just extremely simplified.

An entirely different matter is the problem of pseudo-scholarship or conscious forgery. There exist hundreds of organisations that use the Internet to spread lies about basically everything, including the Holocaust. The purpose of such lies can be politically, religiously or ideologically motivated – or it can be for fun.

It can be difficult to see through such “fake” web sites. An excellent case in point is the American centre for Holocaust denial, which has the very reliable (and very academically sounding) name ‘Institute for Historical Review’. They of course have a web site, which disperse wrong allegations about the Holocaust.

When searching for information on the Internet and using web based material it is thus important to:

• Make your query as specific as possible in order to avoid “noise”. It takes a long time to go through 1 million results…
• To check who is behind the information. Is it a respectable home page?
• To think about the quality of the material you have found. Does the material seem oversimplified or outdated??

Enjoy!