Quality of web documents

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Which documents to trust?

The problem of recognition of quality documents, that could be trusted, among billions of web documents is acute.

No simple and standard mechanism, that would enable us to recognise good documents, exists.

No institution, that would do such work for us to a great extent and fast enough, exists.

Sometimes the decision will be based on a set of simple, but vague rules and some intuition.

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Which documents to trust?

There is no problem with documents that are digitalised versions of paper documents and we would trust paper originals.

However, are these documents really what they seem to be? It is easy to forge the document on a normal academic server, but such misconducts are rare.

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Which documents to trust?

With other documents the user should use similar mechanisms as in paper world: search for the description of peer-review policy,

especially in e-journals; use documents that came from respected academic

institutions; use documents that are being pointed to by

respected researchers or research groups; use documents that are part of respected digital

library with well-defined collection policy.

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Rules of a thumb

Is the page signed? If it is signed, is the author qualified?

Is the page dated? If it is dated, is it regularly updated?

Is the page sponsored? Who is the sponsor? Does the information show bias? Are there any advertisements on page? (?)

Is the page itself a hidden advertisement? Is the page professionally built? Are the links current?

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Is the page signed?

Example taken from http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html

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Is the author qualified?

Example taken from http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html

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Who is the sponsor?

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Is the page regularly updated?Example taken from http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html

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Are there any advertisements

Example taken from http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html

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Example taken from http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html

sometimes it is not difficult to judge the page

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Institutional help

HON (http://www.hon.ch) Health On the Net Foundation Founded in 1995 in Geneva, Switzerland. Trying to promote the reliability and credibility

of health information on the Internet. Trying to standardise rules for Web site

developers to hold to basic ethical standards in the presentation

of information; to help make sure readers always know the source

and the purpose of the data they are reading.

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Institutional help

A non-profit organisation, that issues Net Foundation Code of Conduct (HONcode) to the institutions that obey HON basic rules.

The institution apply for the HONcode and its web pages are evaluated by the HON staff.

If everything is OK, the institution can put the HONcode sign on its pages.

The site is regularly re-evaluated and can loose the HONcode sign.