The credibility problem

Who to trust?

Credibility is a long standing problem of knowledge sharing – just think of fake degrees or plagiarism scandals. However couple of decades ago you could trust the sources of information or knowledge to a certain degree. Education institutions had to meet an accreditation criteria, newspapers employed well educated, experienced journalists with a track record and professional books were reviewed by a another professional. In general there was enough stability and barriers of knowledge sharing that only professionals could afford to share knowledge on a large scale and credibility was easier to check and control. Naturally this world was far from ideal, it was just much easier to find your way among the sources of information. Now not only the amount of available information exploded but so did the sources of it as well. New things arrive and new sources of information appear and disappear. How do you know which to trust? Is page rank a good measure of credibility? Or are much "liked" pages credible? They are a measurement at least, but not too reliable. 

How to be credible?

From the publishers/authors point of view credibility must be build, managed and protected even more carefully on the Web than in life. In life you usually can expect that time covers your early mistakes, on the Web these mistakes may be only a click away.  Character is even more important than before even if that character is virtual. I don't think it's easy to maintain a virtual character different from  own for a long time, not to mention moral.

How to measure credibility?

As a reader it's even harder to decide which source to trust. Some sites have a well earned reputation but several not. It would be good to build a credibility index (where the creditors are measured as well) like digg, del.ico.us, StumbleUpon.. and so on.  A credibility rank can be also imagined similar to page rank. The credibility rank (CR) could depend on sources referred; a higher number of credible sources referred would result in higher level of credibility, and agreement; CR of a site is higher if other (credible) sites dealing with a similar topic come to comparable conclusions.

Naturally every human and organization wants to build goof relationships but it’s time to put credibility on your agenda, be credible also for people who you even don’t know!