Week 5 Hoax or Real

This last week we each analyzed one website to see if it was a hoax or if it was real. Some of these websites were extremely bizarre, but they were still organized and set-up as a reliable website. For example, the website that I had be analyzing continuously referred back to studies conducted by "Doctors" and other "trustworthy" researchers, but in fact they were complete phonies. Their list of references included famous people that had nothing to do with the study the website was talking about, such as Dr. Seuss.

For us to determine if the website was a hoax or if it was real we completed different steps to validate the site. However, when trying to validate the information on the site there was little to no luck. For example, my website was a study on the reaction of cats to men with beards. My first thought was, this is a hoax, only crazy people would try and test this. However, while reading their information it began to look more credible because they were citing work of other researchers. Still unconvinced that this was a "real" webpage, I searched the names of the different researchers, but I only found links that took me to the same website I was already looking at. That is when I started to look at the references listed at the bottom and noticed the list of people was extremely unreliable. In the end I discovered my website as a Hoax.