Information credibility

This article provided clarity on many things for me, often times when using the internet it can be hard to tell the difference between factual useful material and some bloggers personal biased opinion. Having skills and knowledge to sort through all the vast information on the internet is surely a challenge however the article named Criteria to Evaluate the Credibility of WWW Resources systemically systematically taught me criteria for credible sources like evaluating the author, website, and even the URL.

Too often if a website looks appealing and professional we are quick to assume the information is coming from a reliable source, however we must be looking at the author to see if he has credentials to be writing the information. Before declaring an article factual you have to know who the author is, if he has sufficient knowledge on the subject, and why he is writing it in order to check for bias.

While the author is crucial in evaluating a source the website itself is a huge indicator for the quality of the information. The look of the website and the quantity of advertisements will tell you the agenda of the site. If a site has multiple pop-ups and obnoxious advertisements the may be more interested in selling you a product than providing quality facts.

The most surprising tip this article provided was that the URL of a website can actually tell what the site is used for. The author goes into brief detail about how the reader is able to take the URL piece by piece and deduce where the website came from, who is running it, and even more information.