You don't really.

Skepticism is a practiced skill, rather than just "being skeptical", you can learn how to assess credibility of a source, and develop a habit of doing so.

I quite like skeptics guide to the universe podcast. Although I admit I usually skip chunks of each episode.

Another avenue is researching about cognitive biases. We all do it.

AI is poisoning Wikipédia.

Huh?

I just follow you around and read what you throw out.

Nothing is a panacea against slop, but for general search, I've become a huge fan of Kagi. Gave up Google years ago, went to DDG, but Kagi is a cut above. There is a subscription fee, however. (Not shilling - no association with them, just a happy user).

Use the Google flag of "before:2022" added to any search. This will limit returned results to only those captured before 2022, which is when AI slop feedback started. Obviously this doesn't work for current events, but if the data you're looking for doesn't need to be recent it can be useful.

Example:

The uncomfortable truth is that we lived through a very unique golden age of veracity. The photograph and later video completely revolutionized and changed the whole idea of what knowledge and verification were. Prior to indisputable photographic evidence, word and reputation carried more weight as often they were the strongest evidence towards the truth. AI has kind of us returned us to that stage, weirdly making the period of veracity we considered permanent instead a comparative blip in human history.

What kind of information are you looking for?

I don't know if it's a location as much as a mindset for me.

I look for fallacies and falsehoods and should they arise at rates that would be hard to chalk up as honest error, I stop trusting the source.

For news: the Bylines network in the UK. They have a source checker for every article.

Similar to the top comment, I learned leftist political theory (mindset in their case). Once you understand what capitalism and socialism truly are, you have almost like a shield to protect you from certain propaganda. This sounds arrogant, but its genuinely been my experience

most news are from propaganda sources, look for how its being worded in the title.

Books?

When I hear news and I'm unsure of the validity of it, I Google and under the news section, if there are multiple articles from various different sources talking about it, I figure it's true

RSS ( multiple sources for current events) , Wikipedia, and forums.

I'm a user of Brave Search and I get reliable information with every search. I wonder what kind of information you're even looking for though. And Wikipedia is still pretty reliable for me.... Maybe try Brave Search instead of Google?