Evaluating the Credibility of Web Sources
Researchers need to regard information they find on the Web with skepticism,
and to constantly evaluate the credibility of this information.
Building Research Tools with Google For Dummies gives you suggestions about how to go
about evaluating the credibility of Web information. For more information on this
important topic, have a look at Chapters 2 and 11.
Asking the following questions will help you decide if information you’ve found is, indeed, credible:
- Is the information published by a reputable source?
- Does the publisher of the page have a vested interest (particularly an undisclosed vested interest) in the subject of the information? For example, pollution statistics from a Web site called People For the Abolition of Automobiles might be skewed, just as pollution results presented by the MGGA (Manufacturers of Gas Guzzlers Association) may also be biased.
Just because a source of information appears to have a bias doesn’t mean that the information is useless. You just need to be aware of the bias as you compile search results so that you don’t accept opinions as if they are facts.
- Is the Web page (and its parent site) internally consistent and put together carefully? Sites that are sloppy, contain broken links and misspellings, are probably not good research sources. Ditto if the source contradicts itself or uses faulty logic.
- Does the page contain strident ads or adult material? This is not a good sign.
- Are purported “facts” on a page, particularly if they are seemingly unlikely, given attribution (via a hyperlink, or perhaps by referring to a book)?
- If the page contains information about when it was updated, is it fresh, or stale?
Just because something appears in writing, or on a Web page, it doesn’t mean it is true. You can use the questions in this sections as a starting place towards evaluating the information on a Web page, and you should always evaluate credibility carefully l before giving any weight to the information on a Web page.
Rumors fly quickly around cyberspace, and knowing whether the hot tip you saw on a Web site (or in an e-mail) is the real thing or another digital folk legend. Be skeptical! One place I go to check out this kind of information is the Urban Legends Reference Pages. (And who says the legends have to be urban?)
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