Evaluating Information on the Web

The web contains information from all over the world in billions of documents and files. However, this information varies greatly in quality and reliability. Articles published in journals have all been through an evaluation process that includes editing and peer review. Peer review is a system used to check the quality and reliability of articles submitted for publication. It involves several experts in the field checking that the article conforms to specific criteria.

There is no filtering process for the web. Because anyone can create a web page, fraudulent web pages can appear equally with articles from peer-reviewed journals. The aim of this page is to suggest techniques you can use to evaluate the reliability of information you have found on the web. It will cover techniques you can use to find more information about a web page, and questions you should ask to help you evaluate the authority and appropriateness for your purpose of the web page.

Finding Information about the Web Site from the URL

The URL is the web page address that appears in the address bar of your browser. It also appears as the last line of each of your results from a search engine. You can tell quite a bit about a page before you go to it if you look at the URL and then choose the most reliable and appropriate page for your purposes. eg if you are looking for official statistics you may want to choose a page from a .gov domain.

What domain does it come from?

Some top level domain's are restricted, and can only be used by certain groups. Domains ending in .gov, or .gov.au or another two letter country code are official government web pages. They are likely to contain official documents and other authoritative information. Official government sites will always have the domain.gov. For example, the official Whitehouse web page is Whitehouse.gov, whereas whitehouse.org is a parody web site. This site could be useful if you want information about the political views, but is not what you want if you want official government information. Domain's ending in .edu or .ac are educational and academic sites. Domains ending in .org are not-for profit organizations. These vary considerably depending on the nature of the organization. There are many authoritative sites created by organizations eg The Cancer Council of South Australia

Is it a personal page?

Personal pages usually have a personal name following a ~ or %, or have the words "members" or "people" or "users" as part of the URL. Personal pages vary greatly in quality so you need to investigate the credentials of the author.

Is the URL the genuine address of the organisation or body producing the page?

Look for intentional misspellings in the URL which take you to a different site For example www.bloomberg .com is not the same as www.bl00mberg.com.

Long URLs

Some URLs are intentionally long, so only the first part is usually visible in the status bar. It might look genuine, but it's not a guarantee of where you'll end up. Therefore, you need to view the entire URL and go there to make sure it's really the site you are expecting.

Who owns the site?

If you are not sure whether a site is genuine or a parody or hoax, finding who owns the site may help you decide. You can find who owns a site by going to Easywhois.com and typing in the URL. This will tell you the registered owner of the web site. For example, http://www.gatt.org/ appears to be the official World Trade Organization page. It looks graphically identical to http://www.wto.org/, the official page. If you check the ownership of www.gatt.org, it is owned by a private individual in New York; whereas the genuine WTO page is owned by the UN International Computing Centre in Geneva.

Author

• Can you clearly identify who wrote the page?
• Is there any biographical information about the author? Look for links that give information about the author and perhaps lists their other publications. Look for links that say things like "About Us" "Background" "Biography".
• If you can't find an author, look for the organization that is responsible for the page. If this is not stated, you can often find it by clicking on the copyright notice. Another way to find this is to truncate the URL by deleting all characters to right of the domain name. This should take you to the publisher of the page.
• What are the author's qualifications and credentials to write on this topic? Are they an acknowledged expert in their field, or is it a school essay? Can you verify the author's credentials from other sources?

Date

• Can you find the date the page was written or last updated?
• Does the "date last updated" indicate that the page is still being maintained and updated by the author? A recent "last updated" date does not necessarily mean that the content has been updated: it might mean that minor changes such as broken links were made.
• If you want to check how much as site's content has changed over time you can use the Wayback Machine to check it at a certain date. Just paste the URL of the page into the Wayback machine and select from the available archive dates. Not all pages from within a site will be available. To check for recent changes to a page you can use the cached copy of the page in Google. This will show you the page as it was when Google last indexed it.
• Is it important that the page be recent for your topic?. For some topics, historical material may be very useful.

Aim of the Page

• Is it to inform or explain? A good example of this type of site is Health on the Net Foundation, whose stated purpose is to ".. guide lay persons or non-medical users and medical practitioners to useful and reliable online medical and health information."
• Is it to sell? Many pages from the .com domain have this aim, but it may be designed to appear objective. Biotechnology Good to Grow provides information about recent developments in plant biotechnology. However, it is sponsored by Monsanto: and this is stated on the page.
• Gun-Control Australia and MotherFox have different perspectives on the same issue. It is not always easy to tell if a page aims to indoctrinate as it may be disguised as a legitimate site for the purpose of spreading misinformation. http://www.martinlutherking.org appear at first glance to be the legitimate Martin Luther King site, but investigation reveals that it is owned by a white supremist organisation.You can find this out by looking at who owns the site and by following the link to the Discussion Forum. The genuine site is http://www.thekingcenter.org/
• Is it a parody of another site? Usually the satire is fairly obvious so the content is not easily mistaken for the truth: compare http://www.whitehouse.net/ with http://www.whitehouse.gov/ Parody sites can often be useful if you want alternative information, but make sure you have correctly identified it as a parody. This can be more difficult if you arrive at the page from a search engine and see information out of the context of the site as a whole. For example News.com.au recently ran a story that from "London Correspondents" saying mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Who is the intended audience?

• Is it primary school children, family, academic researchers, consumers etc
• Look at the reading level of the page, content, graphics, design.
• Are the sources cited correctly?

Who links to the page?

• You can find what sites link to a page by going to Google Advanced Search and entering a URL into the Find pages that link to the page box under Page Specific Tools. For example if you type in www.martinlutherking.org the majority of sites that link to this page are white supremist sites, anti-jewish sites or sites about evaluating internet resources.
• How reputable are the sites that link to the page?
• Do they suggest bias?
• Are any of the linking sites directories? If so, what do they say about the page

If in Doubt, Triangulate!

If you are not sure of the veracity of information, triangulate - try to find the same information from other sources. For example if it is medical information look for articles in peer-reviewed journals through Medline. Don't use information that you cannot verify from another source.

There are a number of sites that help you track hoaxes:

Snopes

Searching for "Scholarly" Information

By searching with Google Scholar you can limit your results to what Google thinks of as scholarly, so this may narrow your search results considerably.

Useful Sites for Further Information

Barker, Joe Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask

Byrne, Edward, Evaluation of Web Resources

Piper, Paul S Better Read That Again: Web Hoaxes and Misinformation

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