Evaluating Information - Sources On The WWW

CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING INFORMATION SOURCES: Authority Is it clear who is responsible for the page? The final element in the URL may provide a clue: com indicates a commercial origin, edu an educational institution, gov a government body, org a non-profit organization.   Is it clear who wrote the material? Are the author's qualifications stated?   If an organization is responsible, is there a way to verify its legitimacy? Is there a statement of purposes? Is there a telephone number and an address (not just an e-mail address)? Accuracy If factual information or statistics are given, are the sources clearly stated?   Is the information free of grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors? (These kinds of errors not only indicate a lack of quality control, but can produce inaccuracies in information). Objectivity Is advertising clearly differentiated from information?   Are biases clearly stated?   Are opinion/editorial pieces clearly labelled? Currency Are there dates to indicate when the page was written? When it was last revised?   If information from another source is included, is it clear when it was written?   Are there other indications of frequency of updates? TYPES OF WEB SITES WHICH NEED TO BE EVALUATED WITH SPECIAL CARE: Business/Marketing: Purpose is to provide information and/or advertising for a company or product, and frequently to stimulate consumer interest or to sell directly. Print sources usually make a clear distinction between advertising and information; on the web, this distinction can be blurred. "Infomercial": A blend of advertising, information and entertainment. Personal pages: For a comparatively small investment of time and money anyone can mount a personal home page; purposes for doing so vary widely. REMEMBER: The Web is only one source of information: It can be very useful for certain topics   It can be almost useless for other topics   To research a topic thoroughly use a variety of sources, both web and traditional.   Adapted from Alexander and Tate, Evaluating the World Wide Web (c) Widener University, 1996. http://www.science.widener.edu/~withers/evalout.htm

      

Last updated: 01/1997
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