: Re: How can I know that what's on a site is true? So from my other question, I was told that under certain circumstances, you could trust Wikipedia. But then after a couple of answers, I started

@Barnes643

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The answer by DPT is very good and I would accept it as it is.

I add a general rule: you can't know what is true or not unless you can cross-check your information with other information.

Good resources, such as academic, contain references to other works, which confirm or prove the given information. If you don't have references, you can widen your study by reading more stuff about the subject - for instance, don't rely on one newspaper, but read many of them, to see the differences in the telling of the same event. This will not give you the truth but will give you more elements to analyze.

To understand if a certain source of the website is reliable, it requires a certain experience, but an easy answer can come from the external elements of the website, such as:

Who wrote the piece, or the other pages on the site? Is it a reliable author?
Is the piece written in good and correct English (or any language), or does it contain misspellings and/or errors?
what other articles are published on that site? Are they good or are they sketchy?
are the tone and style exaggerated, or over-emphatic, or very broad and generic? Or is it measured and rationale?

These elements can give you a hint about the quality and reliability of the source. The IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations) produced a very nice poster on "how to spot fake news", which works also to address the quality of a source: www.ifla.org/publications/node/11174

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