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ECS 300: Web sites

Evaluating websites

Because anyone can and will put anything up on the Web, it is vitally important to evaluate websites you'll use in your annotated bibliography or in any other academic assignment

Some things to look for include:

  • Authority: Who wrote the site, or is responsible for the content? Does it even say? What credentials does the person or association have to write about the topic?
  • Purpose: What is the purpose behind the website? Is it trying to sell you something? Is it slanted or biased in any way? See the box at the bottom of this page
  • Date: When was the website created or last revised? Does it even say? Many websites are created and then left as "orphans," never updated. Remember that none of your resources for the bibliography can be older than 5 years.
  • Etc.

The Archer Library has a general guide on evaluating resources of all sorts here

The University of California at Berkeley Library have more criteria to evaluate resources here

Web directories: evaluated content

  • Doing a Google or other search engine search gives tons of results, of varying quality

  • Try, instead, a Web directory that reviews the Web resources it gathers, such as ipl2: Information you can trust. They only include good resources in their directories

  • In the Web directory, you can either search by broad subject as given, or do a more precise search in the search box  

  • Infomine: an American directory of reviewed Web resources for university students

  • Note: some of the websites Infomine includes are not free -- there will be a $ by a fee-based site

Reason you need to evaluate websites

  • Clicking the image used to lead to a webpage on Martin Luther King, Junior, that turned out to be hosted by Stormfront, a white supremacist non-governmental organization in the States, which is totally legal there: the link is broken because they got kicked off their website
  • Their Martin Luther King site was not exactly the sort of website you want kids using for their school assignments!
  • Google martinlutherking.org and you get some interesting stories...
  • When it was originally created, the picture they use was the same one used on the real King Center site: http://www.thekingcenter.org