It's getting harder to trust anything online. Is that a bug, or a feature?
Thanks to a proliferation of news hubs and social platforms, our world as guided by the internet is more individualized than ever. While sifting through the noise, is there somewhere we can all trust is true and accurate?
Wikipedia is a crowdsourcing miracle. But can we trust it?
Of all the websites in the world, few are as frequently visited as Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia features millions of articles covering nearly everything, from Charlemagne and COVID-19 to Curb Your Enthusiasm. But Wikipedia is built on submissions and edits from anyone, anywhere in the world. So how much can we actually trust what we read on the internet's signature compendium? Record Producer Alec Cowan speaks with Richard Cooke, journalist and author researching Wikipedia and its role online.
How to build a more trustable internet, and what got us here in the first place.
With so many places to get information, it's easy to live within an echo chamber of our preferred worldview. This isolation, alongside the proliferation of "alternative facts," has led to an all time low in our trust of information online. Should we just give up and believe everything online can't be trusted? Or are there glimmers of hope? Bill Radke speaks with Rachel Moran, a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for an Informed Public studying trust in online information.
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Bill Radke
Host
Bill hosts Week In Review and Words in Review. After starting with KUOW as a University of Washington student in 1985, Bill was KUOW's morning host in the '90s and the creator of past show, Rewind, a news-satire show heard on KUOW and nationwide on NPR. Bill moved away to Southern California to host American Public Media's Weekend America and Marketplace Morning Report and returned to KUOW in 2012.
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Alec Cowan
Producer, Soundside
Alec Cowan is a producer for Soundside. His interests have brought many eclectic stories to the program, and his segments gravitate toward history, technology, arts and culture, and the environment. He's proud to be KUOW's unofficial "boat guy."
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