Almost anyone can put up almost anything on
the Web for almost any purpose. Look for ambiguity, manipulative
reasoning, and bias. Examine assumptions, including and perhaps
especially, your own.
Accuracy is not easy to confirm. As with any research, you
must test one source against another.
Here is an example. Who coined the phrase Question
Authority!? Look at eight different Web sites
and you might get eight or ten different answers.
- Several sites attribute it to
Timothy Leary
but few bother to indicate where he said or wrote it.
- A page claiming that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent says Leary was quoting Socrates.
- In addition to Socrates,
Ben
Franklin hasn't been forgotten, nor Galileo, Hunter S.
Thompson, nor James Baldwin.
- Many simply credit "anonymous," a graffiti
artist or a bumpersticker.
Perhaps it's a bumper sticker summation of Socrates'
idea.
- For those of you who trust Wikipedia,
even it doesn't seem to know [citation needed].
My advice: question the authority of all these Web
sources.
To complete the circle, this page has been used (but not cited) as
an authority
on the origins of the slogan. On one page my phrase "bumper
sticker summation of Socrates' idea" has been repeated. |
