Monday, January 26, 2009

.org sites: useful or misleading?

Remember in middle school and high school when your teachers told you that, on very important research papers, using any website other than the '.org' would give you wrong information? They also added that sites such as Wikipedia were misleading and many times false. I was recently told of a '.org' site on Martin Luther King, Jr. that was very interesting. This is what I found:
On the front page is a professional-looking, stoic picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. The headline reads, "A True Historical Examination". Another headline offers students a 'pop-quiz' on King, to see how much they know about him. Some of the links were titled, "Truth About King," "The Death of a Dream," and "Jews and Civil Rights." 
As I followed the links, I found accusations of King's plagiarism of sacred texts, and pictures of his attendance at 'communist training schools." At the end of my research through this website, I discovered that this so-called 'honest' .org website is managed by a white supremacy group. 
It pays to read what the websites are telling you, especially when doing research. Had some fifth grader found this website and written an essay on it for their social studies class, not only would they have failed, they would have quite a problem on their hands. It is not enough to limit yourself to the .org or 'safe' websites. Check your source two, three, four times before you take it for fact. 
Just a thought.