Evaluating Websites.

There is no filtering process for the web. Because anyone can create a web page, fraudulent web pages can appear as well as reliable information.  There are techniques you can use to evaluate the reliability of information on the web. These are techniques you can use to find  information about a web page, and learn about the authority and appropriateness for your purpose of the web page.

 Information on the Web Site from the URL

The URL is the web page address that appears in the address bar of your browser. You learn about a page if you look at the URL and then choose the most reliable and appropriate page for your purposes.

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. The official Whitehouse web page is Whitehouse.gov.  The 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.

How to tell 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 organization or body producing the page?

Look for intentional misspellings in the URl. These are often used by authors to confuse the browser.

Some URLs are intentionally long, so only the first part is usually visible in the status bar.\

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  Whois.com  and typing in the URL. This will tell you the registered owner of the web site.

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 are acknowledged expert in their field, or is is 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 ArchiveMachine 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. For example, look at the Library of Congress Country Page on Iraq. This page gives a detailed history of Iraq and overview of its society and economy. However, in using it is is important to note that the page is not updated and the information is as of May 1988.This information is given at the bottom of each page.

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.
• Is it to persuade or indoctrinate? 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 organization.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 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The story appears to have originated in a satirical newspaper TheDailyFarce.

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 typing the URL into Google or AllTheWeb. For example if you type www.martinlutherking.org into Google and then click on Find web pages that link to 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