Internet
Search Skills
Evaluating Web Sites
Evaluating Web Pages or Web Sites
Earlier, in this tutorial, I quoted John December's 1994 article, "Challenges for Web Information Providers" in Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, where he wrote, "... measures of value and "correctness" gained from traditional media can't be applied to a medium that is highly dynamic and, by its nature, always incomplete."
Janet Alexander and Marsha Tate, Widener University librarians outline the differences between evaluating traditional media and "documents" on the Web in a tutorial:
World Wide Web Guide #6
Finding Quality on the Web
SOME TRADITIONAL CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING PRINT SOURCES:
Source - What is the source of the information? Is it published in a reputable journal, and/or is the journal refereed (i.e., do scholars in the field review the article for quality and accuracy before it is accepted for publication?)
Author - What are the qualifications of the author? Is the author an expert in the field whose credentials are clearly stated?
Timeliness - If currency is important to the topic, how current is the information in the source?
Data - If data are included in the article, what is the quality of the data? How accurate is it, how timely is it, are the variables clearly defined?
Edition - If the source comes out on a periodic basis, what edition of the source are you looking at? Is it the most current edition?
Biases - What are the biases of the author, or of the source of information? Are they clearly stated?
Advertising - Is the publication supported by advertising, and if so might the advertising have an influence on the content of the publication?
Evaluating certain Internet sources against list above can work fairly well. For example, when evaluating messages from electronic discussion lists and Usenet newsgroups, it is usually obvious that you do not know the qualification of the authors or the quality of any data presented. However, even if you recognize the name of the author of a message, because email can be so easily forged you have to be potentially skeptical of everything you read.
Sources found on the World Wide Web, however, can be very problematic to evaluate. Even if you begin on a menu or homepage whose source is clearly defined (such as a University or a commercial business), you can quickly be reading a document from somewhere else entirely. This is because of embedded links to other documents. Additionally, you are often given no indication of the source of the linked document.
In the face of the ambiguity of the World Wide Web, what criteria can be used to evaluate sources found there?
SOME CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING WEB SITES
1. Does the site clearly state what organization or individual is responsible for the information found on it? If the answer to this question is yes, you can apply the traditional criteria for evaluation of print sources found above, remembering, however, that in the electronic world:
Even in an "official" document such as one released by a government agency, the electronic version may be intentionally issued in a different form from the print version. Because of the ease with which both electronic text and electronic images can be altered after their release, (altered either deliberately or by mistake) it can be very hard to determine the "authoritative", "accurate" version of a document or an image.
2. Although the site itself may clearly state who is responsible for monitoring the quality of information found on that site, remember that once you have clicked on a hypertext link to retrieve a document located at another site the same quality may not be guaranteed.
3. Does the web page you are visiting state what criteria are being used to evaluate links included on the page?
4. Does the page tell when it was last updated? Remember, however, that the information you retrieve from following that page's links may not be as current as the information on the original page.
5. If the site is a commercial one, is there a clear distinction between advertisements and factual content, or is there an overlapping, or blending, of these two areas?
To practice evaluating sites, the following table has four different types for us to examine.
| Business | Personal |
| Advocacy | Coverage |
The following form intends only to provide for preliminary evaluation. Examine some of the web pages that you found during the Searching Exercises. If you used the Search Form sheet to record the URL of the page and made some corresponding comment, you have already begun the evaluative process. Many other people have developed evaluation instruments which are available through the link below to reveiw at your leisure.
| Form for Evaluating Web Pages/Sites | Links to Other Evaluation Instruments compiled by Kathy Schrock |
Janet Alexander and Marsha Tate have kindly given their permission for use of their work in this tutorial. Please see their tutorials: Evaluating Web Resources (and with John Powell) A Modular Approach to Teaching the World Wide Web
