Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers is an open textbook initially drafted over Christmas vacation 2016 and published via Pressbooks in early 2017. It was one of the first textbooks specifically designed to teach college students practical, web-native fact-checking skills — moving away from the traditional library-oriented CRAAP test toward tactics drawn from how professional fact-checkers actually work.
The book teaches a "four moves and a habit" approach: check for previous work, go upstream to the source, read laterally, and circle back if needed — plus the habit of checking your emotions before engaging. Practical skills include using date filters to find sources of viral content, assessing scientific journal reputation quickly, verifying tweet authorship, finding deleted web pages, determining website funding sources, checking Wikipedia for vandalism, and parsing URLs. This approach was rooted in the research of Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew at Stanford, who documented how professional fact-checkers use "lateral reading."
The textbook won the 2018 MERLOT Classics Award in the ICT Literacy category. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, it is available through multiple open educational resource platforms and has been adopted by faculty at hundreds of institutions. The "four moves" later evolved into the SIFT acronym, and the textbook's approach formed the foundation of everything that followed — Check, Please!, SIFT, and Verified.