Read on Twitter
We hear it from students all the time: “.com websites are bad. .edu and .org websites are good, unless it’s Wikipedia.” These misconceptions can lead students dangerously astray. A thread on the problem and lesson ideas to use with your students.
When we presented students with an NRA tract on gun control posted to a personal webpage on http://duke.edu and a Wikipedia article on gun politics in the United States with over 200 citations, they overwhelmingly said the Duke site was the more reliable of the two.
Why were so many students taken in by the NRA tract? Many had been told never to use Wikipedia and that .edu websites are always good. Some example student responses 
For a long time web evaluation guides have misled students to believe that top-level domains are a good basis for judging a site’s reliability.
Read our recent research report for more about this issue: https://purl.stanford.edu/mf412bt5333
Read our recent research report for more about this issue: https://purl.stanford.edu/mf412bt5333
But not all .edu webpages host peer-reviewed research, and .org has no connection to credibility. At all. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/dot-org-domain.html
So, how to change this? Start with our domain names lesson. Students first evaluate those same Duke and Wikipedia pages via Google Forms. After a brief discussion of what domain names can (and cannot) tell us about a website, students revise their answers. https://cor.stanford.edu/curriculum/lessons/domain-names
Next, students have a chance to apply their new knowledge by evaluating who cited a stronger source in a conversation on Twitter: one source is an article from the dot-com website of Scientific American and the other is a college student's essay posted to a dot-edu site.
And, you can help students learn why Wikipedia can be a great starting place for research with this video that we developed with @TheCrashCourse
