Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

2.6 The reliability of information sources
Unit 2 Using information sources
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

All information sources should be used with caution, because the information available is always partial and always selective. The information that goes into information sources has to be selected by someone, and hence the information is filtered through someone’s value judgements and can be altered through someone’s error. Thus the basic flaws of information sources are: they are partial, they are partisan, and they may misinform. When using the Internet, you should try to use sites that are most likely to be reliable, such as sites associated with government sources (often with .gov in the address) or with universities (often with .edu or .ac in the address).

The partisan aspects of information sources make them interesting; information sources are themselves cultural artefacts that are worth study in their own right. In Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the choice of words to include, the definitions of words and the choice of quotations to illustrate them carry value judgements that may be used as a guide to issues in the language and society of the period. The same applies to all dictionaries and other information sources - all are to some extent partisan, though few make this explicit. One information source that does make its partisan nature explicit is Kramarae and Treichler’s A Feminist Dictionary (1996), where quotations are used as the major form of information about words, and are selected to question the conventional meanings of words as well as to inform about them.