Separating the good from the bad on the internet

How accurate is Wikipedia, and just how much information can you trust on Twitter or Facebook' A European wide project is set to develop a simple template which can allow academics and students to assess how credible information on the web is. User generated content (UGC) is growing quickly on websites such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Such content can be popular and topical but to date there has been no foolproof way to judge whether it is reliable. Even though a survey carried out for Nature magazine in 2005 found that Wikipedia was as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, citing from such web content has been regarded with suspicion by many academic institutions. Now 400,000 euros has been awarded to a group of researchers in universities from the UK, Hungary, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Finland and Belgium. The initial project by the Concede group will involve the partners assessing what user generated content (UGC) sites are being used by universities. In addition they will be examining UGC options to develop an easily usable tool to assess credibility, veracity, quality and provenance.