Content shared from Firstdraftnews.org under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Evaluating information you find online on social media and in the course of research can be tricky. Checklists like the CRAAP test don't always catch more complex forms of suspect information out there.
A more effective evaluative method is abbreviated as SWIFT and involves analyzing information using five steps. These five steps will use common applications and sites like Wikipedia, Google apps, contextual clues, and fact-checking techniques instead of a checklist.
SWIFT was adapted by Professor Chimene Burnett at TAMU-CC and is based on the SIFT method created by educational technologist Mike Caulfield in 2019. You may see many references to SIFT on this guide and in other places.
Note: This SWIFT method guide was adapted from Michael Caulfield's "SIFT Method" and Professor Chimene Burnett's (TAMU-CC) SWIFT adaptation. The canonical version of the SIFT course exists at http://lessons.checkplease.cc. The text and media of the SIFT site, where possible, is released into the CC-BY, and free for reuse and revision. We ask people copying this course to leave this note intact, so that students and teachers can find their way back to the original (periodically updated) version if necessary. We also ask librarians and reporters to consider linking to the canonical version.
As the authors of the original version have not reviewed any other copy's modifications, the text of any site not arrived at through the above link should not be sourced to the original authors.