“Which sources of knowledge — books, websites, the media, personal experience, authorities or

some other — do you consider most trustworthy and why?”

Humans acquire knowledge through ways of knowing and areas of knowledge.

Knowledge is all around us, the world, and in space. Humans have recorded and have been

recording knowledge in various methods. These methods may include books, personal

experiences, the media or even web pages. Determining the trustworthiness between these

sources of knowledge is a debatable issue. On the basis of reasoning, sense perception, language

and emotion, the knower’s perspective on any source of knowledge can be seen as trustworthy.

For instance, for a Korean kid, his grandfather telling him about his military experiences in the

Korean War is a piece of knowledge and it is trustworthy. On the other hand, an American child

reading a book about her country from a Cuban perspective would not consider the knowledge

trustworthy, as it would potentially not say good things about America. Although all sources of

knowledge are commonly used, all of them possess limitations. However, books are more

accurate and most trustworthy; as they are written by specialized professionals in the topic area

the book is written.

One of the most common ways of acquiring knowledge is by the agency of books. Books

are written by experts, checked and edited, if necessary, by the publishers, since they require

high standard books in order to publish them. Books being written by experts indicate that

accuracy is achieved to a certain extent. The book called The Penguin History of the Twentieth

Century by J.M. Roberts, a British historian, is considered to be a remarkable masterpiece in

history genre. The book is admired by numerous historians for being comprehensive and

objective at the same time. The book is used in International Baccalaureate program to teach

thousands of students and provide them objective knowledge. Thus, to sum up, books are very

important in acquiring knowledge and they are reliable.

However, as in every source of knowledge, books also have limitations. People should

not always rely on what experts say in their books. The expert may be highly biased on the issue

he is writing about. Due to bias, he could write things that do not quite reflect the actual facts.

The readers again acquire knowledge, but this time it is subjective. For example, the novel Heart

of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad portrays the African people as savages. On the other hand,

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe demonstrates that Africans are not savages and they have

culture, and even subcultures exist in each African clan. Therefore, the knowledge Conrad

presents us is subjective and may influence the readers negatively towards Africans. Another

problem with books is that, especially in Sciences field, bearing in mind that science is tentative,

the knowledge the people knew about the planets, let us say, about 30 years ago may not be the

same nowadays. For example, before 2006 Pluto was considered to be a planet. According to the

definition for the term planet, which was created in 2006, Pluto is no longer a planet. Therefore,

the new textbooks that are published or will be published after 2006 would not regard Pluto as a

planet. Consequently, people who are not aware of this information would still say that Pluto is a

planet by claiming that it is/was written in the books they possess. Accordingly, we may procure

wrong information from books and books, therefore, are not always trustworthy.

Internet is the fastest and biggest information and knowledge provider that humans use in

their daily routine. It allows people to find the information needed in several seconds. Although

it is the quickest among all sources of knowledge, some people who still consider it unreliable. In

Internet there are numerous websites that have copyrights belonging to creditable organizations,

such as official government websites and nobody may deny that government websites are not

trustworthy. Some websites contain primary and secondary information about specific events

which make them reliable because as the further away from the primary sources on the website

are, the less reliable the information is. Lastly, apart from them, websites being updated are more

trustworthy than the “zombie” pages. Overall, Internet is a trustworthy source of knowledge and

being very quick contributes to the fact that why millions of people use Internet.

Some Internet pages allow anyone to write and edit the pages and we cannot rely on these

websites at all. A well-known example of such websites is Wikipedia. Anyone can access

Wikipedia with no problems and edit any article however he wants. This is the primary reason

behind why many high school teachers do not recommend their students to use Wikipedia as a

source. Though the information in articles is double-checked by moderators, there are not

enough moderators to see and check every single article. Therefore, presumably, the bigger

portion of these articles is not very reliable as there is almost no control over what is written.

Additionally, the websites that are created are not generally written by experts, unlike in the case

of books, thus the information in them is likely to be false. Consequently, it can be concluded

that the disadvantages of Internet sources, in terms of trustworthiness, outweigh the advantages

of it, which leads to the idea that Internet sources cannot be fully reliable.

Books and websites are two common sources of knowledge that humans rely on while

acquiring knowledge. Although both provide knowledge, one of the two is more trustworthy but

neither is perfect. Writing books require considerable experience and knowledge in the subject

area and not everybody is capable of handling book writing. Since the book writers are

specialists in their subject area, the information in books are very likely to be accurate with no

errors. On the other hand, editing web pages is not a great deal, as nobody can recognize the

original identity of another and it is easy to lie to anybody about it. Therefore, everybody can add

or delete information however they wish, even with no accuracy. This leads to wrong

information, wrong interpretation and, eventually, false knowledge. Not only Internet sources

have weaknesses. Books and their authors also do. However, this does not guarantee that Internet

users, the editors, do not have any biases, having in mind that biased authors represent the weak

side of books. Apart from books and websites, there are other sources of knowledge, such as the

media and personal experience. However, all of them have limitations. The media is almost

always biased. For example, governments use propaganda to manipulate people and affect their

opinion in favor of the government. Besides, almost every newspaper, another media organ, is

biased and sees the things different than others. Relying on personal experience is not a good

source of knowledge, too because it may include person’s bias. Therefore, books still remain

more trustworthy than websites and all other sources of knowledge; and they are the most

trustworthy among all sources of knowledge. They were, are, will be commonly used for

acquiring knowledge in humans’ lives.

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