For any given information found on the web, there can be no surefire way of telling if it is reliable or not. This is so because of the nature of the web. Although it can make promises of delivering relevant information goods to the web user, it cannot make promises to her/him that these goods come from reliable and trustworthy sources.

In a way, the web environment involves many compromises, one of which would be the sacrifice of quality for quantity. In order to encompass as many topics and as much information concerning each topic as possible, the web encourages contributions and almost anyone’s articles can make an appearance on the web.

Contributors can range from your average man-in-the-street, Hyde Park regular, to neo-Nazi activists, to scholars and politicians. There is no way to separate serious writers eager to contribute genuine and reliable information from those who are in to make some sort of negative impact on web surfers.