Evaluating a source means deciding whether you can trust it — by checking who wrote it, what evidence backs it, how current it is, and why it exists. A confident, polished source can still be wrong, so this judgement protects everything you build on top of it.

Here is an uncomfortable truth about the internet: confidence and correctness are not the same thing. A page can be slick, certain, and completely wrong. So before you lean on anything you find, you need a quick way to ask, “should I actually trust this?”

The good news is that you don’t need to be an expert in the subject to judge a source reasonably well. You just need a few habits.

Five quick questions

• Who made it, and what do they know? (A named researcher and an institution beats “anonymous”.)
• When — is it recent enough to matter for your topic?
• Is it backed up by evidence you could check elsewhere?
• Why does it exist — to inform you, to persuade you, or to sell you something?
• Does it fit what you actually need?

One more idea that changes how you read everything: authority is contextual. A travel blogger is a fine source on what to pack for Lagos and a poor one on treating malaria. The question isn’t just “is this a good source?” but “good for what?”

And when a claim really matters, don’t take any single source’s word for it. If something is true, you’ll usually find it echoed by other, independent sources. That habit — checking — is the heart of the next lesson too, where we turn to using what you find honestly. On to Ethical Use of Information.

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.