Maria Konnikova Quotes

You don't want to believe everything you read on the Internet.

Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true.

I don't believe Wikipedia about anything. I don't go there for anything but keywords.

Google' is not a synonym for 'research'.

If I allow journalists to describe a collection and they make mistakes, I'm upset, because the retractions are never noticed.

Teachers say to me, 'The internet is full of rubbish, wrong answers.' But you would be surprised how just long it takes to find wrong information on Google, and where it's not obvious that it's wrong.

One of the problems with the Internet is that a lot of times it is inaccurate.

You shouldn't presume that all quotes that are in a magazine or a newspaper are accurate.

Google transformed the way most of us get our information with a search engine that enables us to find citizen-created media content alongside the work of professionals.

While the web is very much the first draft of history, a rough-cut, it still has to be good journalism, well-sourced, reliable. Clearly, the printed form is going to have more effort put into it, going to be more reflective and relevant.

Wikipedia is so dangerous.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

People think that if they read something in the newspaper or see it on TV, it has to be true.

I think it's weird that the news cedes so much ground to Wikipedia. That isn't true in other informational sectors.

What people actually refer to as research nowadays is really just Googling.

Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you've had a prior training in book culture.

If it's on the Internet, then it's gotta be true.

We need librarians who can handle this tremendous jumble of information that is in cyberspace.

The problem is that with blogging, the model is publish first, maybe fact-check later. In newspapers, the model is you fact check first and then publish. But those models are merging.

Get in the habit of vetting your research as you go - particularly research conducted online. Verify facts from multiple reputable sources before you record them.

Wikipedia gets a lot of things wrong.

Thanks to our modern era, facts are incredibly easy to come by. A few web searches for your subject matter, and you have all the information you could dream of.

As we have learned to our cost in recent years, much “secret information” is simply wrong, while information that is public … is too often discounted.

The Internet has improved a lot in the last few years, but still, you wouldn't want to depend on Web sources for historical analysis. There's just something hard to beat about a book.