Who do you trust on the Web to be telling the truth?

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I have just been reading an article on another site that I use in which a writer has gleefully given a list of odd "facts"about well-known writers and their writing habits. Some of these were so extraordinary (e.g. that William Faulkner could only write if he had just seen someone swallowed by quicksand!) that I decided to dig a little deeper. I found that the most bizarre of these so-called facts came from a single site and that the article writer had lifted parts of a page on that site almost word-for-word. She clearly believed that the page in question was true, despite there being no attribution on it or references to any further information. If you really believe that James Joyce could only give of his best when aboard a sinking cruise ship, or that Jane Austen was in the habit of scribbling "Momma needs a sammich, a big honkin’ sammich!” when the fancy took her, then I respectfully submit that you'll believe anything! The point of my question is that many people seem to be incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction when it comes to pages on the Web. If it's in "print" then it must be true, however extraordinary! A particularly worrying site is Wikipedia, because much of what appears there is indeed reliable, but you cannot be sure that all of it is. It relies on the assumption that, if a wrong fact is included in an article, someone else will correct it. This is indeed true - I have done so myself once or twice - but it is also true that it is perfectly possible for someone to replace a truth with a falsehood. Before we had the Internet everyone relied on books and journals, and the trustworthiness of these was fairly easy to assess - you read the blurb about the author and noted who had published the piece in question. However, this is now far more difficult to do with online sources, and the mixture of the trustworthy and untrustworthy can be extremely difficult to unravel. Another problem is that websites will simply take material from other sites and reproduce it, often without checking its bona fides or those of its writer - even assuming that they have bothered to find out who the writer is. The very fact of a source being credited is often seen as authenticating what is said, even though the original text cannot be trusted. After two or three such credits as a page gets passed from site to site, the text becomes endowed with an aura of reliability that it does not deserve. So how do you go about obtaining reliable information on the Web?