Assessment on researching Valentine's Day online

While researching on the internet for the history of Valentine’s day I began with a website I knew and the first Google search result. This was history.com (The History Channel Website). From this website I had two concerns. This first one was the lack of detail. Both the text and the video on this website stated that there were various St. Valentines, but only went into limited detail on two. Additionally, very few sites I found (minus Wikipedia) went into detail on these various St. Valentines. However, the other two websites (Wikipedia and pictureframes.co.uk) did go into more depth on the two versions of the one St. Valentine that The History Channel website mentioned. Therefore, because other websites had also written about this man, and they included more detail, making his story more comprehensive, I began to believe the information provided by The History Channel.

The second concern I had about The History Channel, and a more influential reason for searching other sources, was that related links next to the video on the history of Valentine’s Day were absurd. One was a kissing contest and another was a wedding where the bride and groom said their vows while in a block of ice. These ridiculous links threw off the credibility of the information on the history of Valentine’s Day.

While one concern I had was lack of detail and the other was credibility of the site, a third concern I had during my research was credibility of information. Pictureframes.co.uk listed no sources and Wikipedia had some, but to me Wikipedia is only a good site to begin learning about a topic, not a place to obtain research information because anyone can put anything onto that webpage.

A final thought I had while researching was: Why was there such a lack of information on how the holiday developed from honoring a saint to the commercialized holiday it is today? Due to the availability of more in depth records in the 19^th and 20^th century I thought there would be a lot of information on this concept, but only one website, Wikipedia, provided information on it and that was barely two paragraphs long.