The World Wide Web seems to have achieved something like significant mass: now when I look for some information on it, I expect to find it, and am rarely disappointed. Moreover libraries and important research journals are increasingly moving their material on to the Web. It is becoming indispensable as a research tool, and, as such, it has enormous advantages: the search engines don't cover all of it, but they do seem to cover a great deal, and using them is vastly easier and more efficient than using the search devices available in a library. And it is very important to acquire Web skills: no-one knows how it will develop, but it won't go away, and can only get bigger, more important, and more useful for almost any job that you may apply for after University.
However it is also true that there is a great deal of nonsense on the Web; gossip, rumour, lies, and just plain rubbish. There are no constraints, effectively: anyone can publish anything. But you shouldn't let that put you off. There is much that is very valuable. In my own specialist field, for instance, the leading American learned journal is called Studies in Bibliography. This very authoritative work has just gone wholesale on to the Web: all fifty years of it, free for anyone to read. The nearest complete set of paper volumes is in Stratford. It would be foolish to do a sixty mile round trip when you can read an electronic copy at any computer connected to the Web.
The rule is: read carefully, and with discrimination. This is true of any reading you do--not everything in print is true, and there is nonsense to be found in libraries as well as on Web sites--but it is particularly true of the Web. Check the source and degree of authority of any page you come to. Can you find out anything about the author, or the web site? Is the text well written and well presented? Is it trying to sell you something? Why is it there? In practice, you will usually find no problem in distinguishing between a scholarly article and some some fifteen-year-old's home-page. If for instance it begins "Hi! My name is Chuck and here are some of my favorite links" then could be a helpful clue.
In cases of doubt a useful guide is the URL, the web address that you will find in the address box at the top of your browser window. If it contains the letters "ac", as in bham.ac.uk, or if the page is American, "edu", the page is in a University computer, and potentially more trustworthy than pages with "co" or "com", both of which stand for "commercial". If you find the letters "aol.com" in the address this is an indication that the page may well belong to the amateur end of the market.
Note: I've had a useful communication that criticises the above paragraph, as follows:
...this advice can be taken the wrong way. As it is, people constructing 'co' or 'com' web sites can be just as wrong as anyone else, and have just as misguided a view on a subject. In fact, 'com' merely indicates that the page is international, and they are not all actually commercial web pages. Some of the best articles I have read come from 'aol.com' and the like, and these far outweigh the quality of the articles I find on the so-called 'trustworthy' sites. There must be some discrimination, but just using the address as a basis is ridiculous. Students could miss many valuable pieces of information as a result of this.
Another useful trick is called "peeling back". Click the mouse in the address box after the URL, and then hit the delete key and delete each letter of the URL, working backwards, until you come to a "/". Then hit return. This will move you up a level, usually to a page that is the parent of the one you were on, which may well give you more information. You can keep doing this until you run out of "/"s.
Information for students of literature can I suppose be divided into three groups: opinions, facts, and texts: actual works of literature. Each should be treated with caution and discrimination if you find them on the Web. This goes without saying about opinions: you are not expected to agree slavishly with any opinion, wherever you find it, but to test it and question it and use it as a base for your own ideas or for creative disagreement. Facts on the Web should be treated with care: if they come from an obviously reputable place, Brown University's Victorian Web, for instance, or the University of Virginia's Rossetti Archive, then fine, you can quote them with assurance. But if the source seems at all doubtful it should be double checked before you quote it. And literary texts, which are on the Web in profusion, should be treated with great care. Check where they come from. The Columbia University's Project Bartleby has immaculately edited and accurate texts; Project Gutenberg, though noble in its aspiration to give away literature free to everyone, is notoriously careless, and if you quote from one of their texts you may well be copying quite serious errors.
A note for language students: Information for students of language is less likely to involve texts, but could otherwise be categorised similarly to the literature information described above, and the same cautions therefore apply. Opinions and theories may carry more weight if supported by references to research findings or other scholars' theories, but the validity of these should not be taken for granted either. Remember that for every theory or opinion there is usually at least one conflicting theory or opinion! Don't be tempted simply to agree with the first theory or opinion you encounter just because it is written in persuasive or impressive language. Try to check the underlying facts. Facts on the Web should also be treated with care: sites for reputable journals such as ELTJ are safer bets than email lists, for example. (Corony Edwards)
If you do use material found on the Web you should of course say where you found it, in a footnote or endnote. There is no universal standard for the way you should do this, but sensible method is proposed by a help sheet provided by Learning and Information Services at South Bank University. They suggest the following format:
AUTHOR, INITIALS (year) Document title [WWW] location of document (date accessed)
in other words,
YEATES, R (1996) NewsAgent for Libraries: Overview [WWW] http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/newsagent/overview.html (January 20th 1997)
If the reliability of the source is not obvious, it would he sensible to add a line or two of comment, just to show that you are aware of the reliability problem. I recommend that you check the entire help sheet, which is very useful.
Finally, a word about plagiarism. The Web makes plagiarism very easy: any aspiring plagiarist can simply copy a paragraph or a whole essay and paste it directly into their own work. This is not recommended. If the marker suspects Web plagiarism, all he or she has to do is to type a phrase from a suspect passage into a search engine (putting it between double quotes to instruct the searcher to find the exact phrase), hit return, and wait for a few seconds, in order to find out if that set of words derives from anywhere in the whole of the World Wide Web.
The rule is: if you copy anything, say you are copying it, and say where you copied it from. The penalties for plagiarism are really very drastic.
So: I repeat, don't let this put you off. The Web is a wonderful resource, and I use it all the time. Carefully.
Tom Davis