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Anyone with plenty of time on their hands can make a professional-looking Web site.
The Web itself is a source of lots of free information. In practical terms
this means that almost anyone can mock-up a Web site full of misinformation,
disinformation, either intentionally or otherwise, and to the untrained eye it could
look just as valid as a Web page from a reliable source.
Disinformation/misinformation can be of two types:
- intentional, for example where a fact is purposely misrepresented to mislead
- unintentional, such as human error in data entry, or the reproduction of inadequately
understood information
With print, we have various ways of evaluating the information. We ask; do I
trust the publisher? Do I trust the author? If we have no way of making a
judgement about either, we judge from the cover of the book, citations, recommendations. |
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On the Web, we do the following:
- Look at the URL. Does the information appear to come from a trusted source? The
domain name is just a name: anyone can take out any domain name, but you can find out to
whom a domain name is registered at Internic
- Who is the author? Who owns the copyright?
- Is reference made to the original source of any information, or
if it is primary
research, to the methods used to gather it?
- When was the information last updated? Sometimes, as on the R & D Intranet,
the date on which the file was last updated is included. But even if this
information isn't volunteered, you can look at the file Properties (hold the mouse over
the link, right click, Properties), which will tell you the size and date of the file at
the end of the hyperlink.
For further information, there is an online, interactive tutorial, the Internet Detective
(http://sosig.ac.uk/desire/
internet-detective.html), which gives a fuller account of
techniques for validating information from the Internet.
The suffix of URL is a good source of information as to where the site has come
from and the type of source. Here are some examples which are useful to make a judgement
as to whether the information given at the site is trustworthy or not.
| Suffix |
Meaning |
Reliability |
| .gov |
Governmental |
often reliable |
| .mil |
Military |
often reliable |
| .net |
this implies that the site is a business concerned with
the internet |
- |
| .com |
Commercial |
- |
| .edu |
Educational |
Not necessarily |
Here are some examples of country suffixes which are useful to be able to recognise.
| Suffix |
Country |
| uk |
UK |
| de |
Germany |
| jp |
Japan |
| za |
South Africa |
| dk |
Denmark |
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