Skip NavEvaluating Content On The Web
Providing good content and accurate information from credible sources is the primary objective of Anbanet. However, the value of the content and its ability to satisfy the information requirements of the user will vary for different audiences.
Material Accuracy | Publisher Credibility | Why Evaluation?
This article is fundamentally neutral, objective and exploratory. It is a compilation of data from different sources and does not serve as a comprehensive resource or authority on website content evaluation. Given the polifaration of fake news and disimformation, you may find bits and pieces you can put to good usage once you take a few minutes and read it.
Accuracy Of Material On The Web
The Internet is a virtual library consisting of an unlimited amount of information gathered from various sources. How do we address issues of accuracy without verifiable sources is the questions been asked by many publishers and online information consumers.
Are there any criteria for evaluating Internet information? Should we question the credibility of material found on the Web? Yes! We should always question or, at least be skeptical of the information we consume on the web. For webmasters and website owners it is extremely important to verify the source of information published.
Electronic and Print Media
People use the web to publish all types of information, but can it be verified? How much of it is accurate? The qualitative controls normally exercised by the print media are often lacking in some online resources and publications. This makes it more difficult to evaluate because you can't evaluate what you cannot verify.
The information is only useful if it can be otherwise verified. In the absent of verification, the author and website information takes on an extra significance. Should we evaluate electronic information more so than that of the print media material?
Evaluation of web resources should begin by assessing the source of the content, and the format, the primary considerations being accuracy, authority, coverage, currency and objectivity. These are just some criteria you can use in the process, but there are different techniques for evaluating the content of Webpages on the internet.
Credibility Of Website Authors & Publishers
Consumers want information they can trust and verify, so website authors and publishers should not overlook or ignore the importance of resource research and evaluation. Most site visitors do not spend time evaluating the content of a webpage.
However, if they decide to buy your product, they do look at the privacy policy, the about page and contact information to check the credibility of the website owner, author and publisher. Building trust with the consumers of your resources take some time to develop. Once you are deemed to be a credible source for accurate and verified web resources, the benefits are endless.
Established, credible and authoritative sites linking to a resource can also play a significant part in giving credibility to a site. Familiarity acceptance and some level of trust can greatly ease the concerns of the site visitor.
Internet resources are rarely static, making the task of content evaluation more difficult than might otherwise be the case. Sometimes it's difficult to determine certain webpage's authorship and accuracy of content. In such circumstances, the resource must be treated with a degree of skepticism.
Rationale For Evaluating What You Find On The Web
WHY? The World Wide Web can be a great place to accomplish research on many topics. But putting documents or pages on the web is easy, cheap or free, unregulated, and unmonitored (at least in the USA). There is a famous Steiner cartoon published in the New Yorker (July 5, 1993) with two dogs sitting before a terminal looking at a computer screen; one says to the other "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
The great wealth that the Internet has brought to so much of society is the ability for people to express themselves, find one another, exchange ideas, discover possible peers worldwide they never would have otherwise met, and, through hypertext links in web pages, suggest so many other people's ideas and personalities to anyone who comes and clicks. There are some real "dogs" out there, but there's also great treasure.
Therein lies the rationale for evaluating carefully whatever you find on the Web. The burden is on you - the reader - to establish the validity, authorship, timeliness, and integrity of what you find. Documents can easily be copied and falsified or copied with omissions and errors -- intentional or accidental.
In the general World Wide Web there are no editors (unlike most print publications) to proofread and "send it back" or "reject it" until it meets the standards of a publishing house's reputation. Most pages found in general search engines for the web are self-published or published by businesses small and large with motives to get you to buy something or believe a point of view.
Even within university and library web sites, there can be many pages that the institution does not try to oversee. The web needs to be free like that!! And you, if you want to use it for serious research, need to cultivate the habit of healthy skepticism, of questioning everything you find with critical thinking.
Note: For more on evaluating resources and content published on the web, visit the source of the information website. Top