Exercise 1: Possible Answers


Your answers may be different. If your answer is more than one point different, discuss it with your teacher.
a) An article in a 1996 CD-ROM encyclopedia with a bibliography.
6: recent date; bibliography; generally respected source

b) A message from someone in a Chat group called 'Tech Talk'
1: the person is anonymous, so you don't know who the author is

c) An e-mail message from a friend about something that happened to a friend of his last year
1: this is second-hand information; you need to hear what happened from the other person directly.

d) A message on a mailing list for people in your profession, written by a well-known person
4: no bibliography; you can't be sure the source is really who you think it is, but mailing lists are more reliable than newsgroups or chat rooms. If the message is about research, give it the higher number.

e) A recent article in an online refereed journal, with a bibliography
6: recent date; bibliography; refereed journal

f) Three paragraphs' worth of information you found through a Gopher search
4: give it the lower number if the date, author, or location is missing. Give it the higher number if the date is recent, the author is well-known, and you have a way to find the information again.

g) A message from someone on a moderated newsgroup (where the postings are controlled by a moderator)
3: if you don't know the author, the quality is questionable, though a moderated group is better than an unmoderated one.


Go back to the August Tech Tip

Updated 28 August 1997 by D. Healey