Whois & Analysis for snopes.com

Snopes.com, also known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a website covering urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other stories of unknown or questionable origin.

It is a well-known resource for validating and debunking such stories in American popular culture, receiving 300,000 visits a day as of 2010.

An urban legend, popular legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend is a form of modern folklore consisting of usually fictional stories, often with macabre elements, deeply rooted in local popular culture.

These legends can be used for entertainment purposes, as well as for semi-serious explanations for random events such as disappearances and strange objects.

Fact checking is the act of checking factual assertions in non-fictional text in order to determine the veracity and correctness of the factual statements in the text.

This may be done either before (ante hoc) or after (post hoc) the text has been published or otherwise disseminated.

Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group.

These include oral traditions such as tales, proverbs and jokes.

They include material culture, ranging from traditional building styles to handmade toys common to the group.

Folklore also includes customary lore, the forms and rituals of celebrations like Christmas and weddings, folk dances and initiation rites.

Each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact.

Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next.

For folklore is not taught in a formal school curriculum or studied in the fine arts.

Instead these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another either through verbal instruction or demonstration.

The academic study of folklore is called folkloristics.

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide.

It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.

The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.