“Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

The great thing about the Web is you can find anything you want on it. The problem with it is credibility. How do you know what you’re reading is accurate or the truth? For example, I’ve always attributed the quote above to Mark Twain. So I searched on the Web, and found it attributed to any number of sources, from the Bible to Ben Franklin. I found what appears to be the most authoritative source on a Web site called Answers.com, which cites The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. “They,” whoever they are, attribute this quote, in its earliest form, to Edgar Allen Poe. So I stand corrected—or do I? Is this a credible source after all?

I try to teach my 12-year-old to scrutinize his sources. He assumes that if it’s written on the Web in general—or Wikipedia in particular—it must be true and accurate. No need to search further! So l loved what California Institute of Technology grad student Virgil Griffith did when he created a way to “out” the anonymous editors on Wikipedia. Through a rather simple approach of matching known IP addresses to the content in the Wiki, you can use Griffith's WikiScanner to discover who’s doing the editing (at least at an organizational level). According to an article on Wired.com, he was inspired by news that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries.

I love this story for three reasons. One is that it helps remind people to question their sources. Second, I love the fact that this guy thought of doing this in the first place. IP addresses are publicly available information, and he figured out how to match those addresses to the content in Wikipedia. It’s a rather simple concept, but no one else had figured it out before him. The third reason is that he’s a student, and I want to encourage students to do more investigation into technology and the Internet.

When I figure out how to do it, I’ll start a Student Hall of Fame on this blog so I can track other cool things that students do—like 17-year-old George Hotz, who figured out how to unlock the iPhone. His motivation, according to an interview he gave CNBC? “It was fun.”