I ran across an interesting list of fake websites today, some of which are quite convincing. For instance, this fake hospital site looks at first glance to be the real thing. True, they have links to improbable feats of genetics and male pregnancy, but there is very little else on this site which obviously gives it away. Another very well-done site is this page describing the grammar of an Antarctic language. It’s remarkably comprehensive, academic and dry, and it contains citations (from journals like Antarctic Studies) and an academic URL. In short, it’s perfectly believable–if you weren’t already aware that humans have never lived in Antarctica. In fact, this language was created by a reference librarian with a linguistics background at Montana State University.
This is why it’s important to evaluate websites that we come across. Babson Library has a great handout (PDF) about evaluating websites, but I can tell you that probably the most effective way of determining whether to trust a website is to do a little further research. Go poke around and see if some of the claims being made on the website appear elsewhere. Find a source you trust and look for the information there. For example, I had a momentary loss of confidence about Antarctic languages and decided to reassure myself that, no, they really weren’t real by looking up some of the journal articles the author had referenced. I checked Google Scholar, a free service from Google which indexes millions of academic citations, to see if any citations popped up. Fortunately for my sanity none did. If I had wanted to press the point further, I could have done a search in an encyclopedia or our library’s online databases for “Feorran,” the name of the language.
I did the same with male pregnancy. I thought to myself that male pregnancy, should it happen, would be pretty big news. So I took a look in Yahoo News, a free news search engine. I searched for “male pregnancy” (I placed it in quotes, which tells the search engine to find the exact phrase), and found almost nothing except for an interesting link to a science quiz (Question: To what species in the animal kingdom is the term “male pregnancy” applied? Answer: seahorses and pipefishes–species in which the male carries the young!) and several ads. If I had wanted to push the point further, a search in LexisNexis Academic would have shut the door on the pregnant (human) man for good.
If nothing else, exposing students to convincing, yet fake, websites firmly plants the idea that not everything on the web can be trusted, and that it is the job of the person doing the research to verify his or her sources.
