Objective: The purpose of this project is to become skilled in evaluating websites for accuracy, reliability, trustworthiness, and validity. In other words, you should become better at deciding if you can trust the information you find on a website.
Discussion Groups
Group 1. Click
here
Group 2. Click here
Group 3. Click here
Group 4. Click here
Group 5. Click hereGroup 6. Click Here
Purpose
We should always try to ascertain a website's purpose. What
is it trying to do? Why was it created? Most websites are
designed to sell services and products, present information,
advocate ideas, or entertain. Many sites do several of these
at once. A website's purpose will not always be clear.
Look
at Butz's
site. His purpose is surely advocacy,
although he comes
across as an objective (factual) information provider,
especially in
the closing sentence of his article: "Surely any thoughtful
person must be skeptical." Does that ring any warning bells?
Your ability to
distinguish between objectivity and advocacy is essential in
determining a website's purpose. Make sure to understand the
purpose(s) of a website, and that those
purpose(s) may not be entirely obvious.
Author
The next step in validation involves the site's author. We
all know that it's easy to fool people. Many people,
especially kids, will believe someone if he
sounds authoritative. When I've talked to adults about Butz's
website, they never fail to point out that Butz is a
professor, sure, but he's an Engineering professor. How does
that
qualify him to speak as an expert on the Holocaust? It
doesn't. But people see "Professor" and take what he says as
gospel.
You probably don't know anything about Butz but could research
his background.
If you run a search for "Arthur Butz," you would find Butz's
name on a page titled "Holocaust Deniers" at a site called
HateWatch (http://hatewatch.org/). Similarly, you would find
Butz's article listed on HateWatch: An Educational
Resource Combating Online Bigotry "
(http://hatewatch.org/-follow Online Bigotry-Hate by
Category-Holocaust denial). You would find Butz mentioned
negatively in a March 1998 USA Today article titled, "College
anti-Semitism on the rise, according to new report"
(http://www.collegenews.com/headlines/news173.htm). You would
find
Butz's book described as popular among "anti-Semites" in a
review of Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust
found at
http://www.skeptic.com/02.4.siano-holocaust.html. You would
find Butz mentioned appreciatively on the "Aryan Re-Education
Page," at the frightening address of "whitepower.com" (which
contains a section for anti-hate sites labeled "The Hall of
Shame: JEWS SCUM.").
By running this search on Butz, you may be able to see
how other people categorize Butz.
Meta-Web Information
"Meta-Web Information" allows you to look at websites as
part of the Internet; in other words, meta-Web information
validates Web pages solely within the context of other Web
pages.
Let's start with the URL, or address, of a Web page. You need to know
when you're accessing a personal home page.
Most Internet Service Providers (ISP's) give their subscribers a
few megabytes of free space on a Web server to use as they
please.
Here are two sample URLs:
"http://www.cdsinet.net/users/bartlett" and
"http://www.alphalink.com.au/~jdm/index.htm". An experienced
Web user knows that both URLs point to personal home pages.
In the first example, the word "users" is the tip off.
"bartlett" is the user name of someone who accesses the
Internet through cdsinet.net. In the second example, focus on
the "~". A tilde -- the "~" -- indicates a website created
by someone given space on a Web server. "stefan" is the user
name of someone who accesses the Internet through
icon-stl.net.
Knowing the above, by looking at Butz's URL -
http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/index.html - you see the
"~," a dead giveaway that this is a personal website.
Instead of assuming that Butz's website
was sponsored by
Northwestern, Zack would know that it was equivalent to a
bulletin board posted outside an office.
Just as you can read people by their clothing, you can learn
about a website by looking at its URL. But even though
clothing tells us a lot, the company a person keeps tells us
more. Learning how a webpage interacts within the network of
all other websites is valuable information.
There is also a powerful tool that can place a website in context
- the link command.
