Evaluating a website - transcript

This is a transcript of the video "Evaluating a website", hosted on YouTube.

Transcript

Before you use a website in one of your assignments, you should ask yourself a few questions to evaluate its quality

Lets try evaluating these three websites about Coronary Artery Disease. Here I have one by the University of Michigan, one by Healthline, and one on everyone's favourite: Wikipedia.

Firstly, let's ask if the website is authoritative. So we need to identify an author for each page, and see if they are qualified on the topic.

When we look at Healthline, this page was last reviewed by a named author, Stacy Sampson. Clicking on her name takes you to a page with a short bio, explaining she is a Family doctor.

The Michigan medicine site doesn't give a specific author for this page, so we treat the organization as the author. So this page is authored by the Cardiac Surgery department of a medical university, the University of Michigan, in the United States.

When assessing Wikipedia pages which can have hundreds, or even thousands of authors, one thing you can try is using the Page Statistics feature on the View History tab to see if there are specific users who are responsible for a large amount of that page's content.

Here, a user called Doc James has written the largest portion of this page. Clicking on the username takes you to their profile page, where you can see this user says he is an Emergency Medicine doctor and you can review this information to see how authoritative he might be to write on this topic.

Next we ask, is the information on this website CURRENT? Can we find a date that the page was made or updated, and how up-to-date does our information need to be?

On the Michigan Medicine page - after checking at the top and bottom, we can't find any information on when this page was last updated

The embedded video gives a reviewed date of 20 October 2019, but that only applies to the video, not the rest of the page. And while the footer has a copyright date of 2020, that date is for the entire Michigan medicine website, not the info on this particular page, so we can't tell how current this page is.

The Healthline page actually gives two different dates of last review - 23 June 2020 at the top and 23 January 2018 at the bottom. We can probably assume the more recent date at the top, is accurate.

On the View History tab of the Wikipedia page, you can see that this page has been edited last on 19 October 2020, but that only tells us that one small edit was made on that date. Because Wikipedia is generally edited incrementally, little-by-little, it's very hard to tell when a particular part of the page was last updated, but if a page is edited very frequently like this one, the page is probably mostly up-to-date.

Now we consider the purpose, and the objectivity of the website.

One rough way to assess a page's purpose is to see what domain the website has. Dot com usually means that website is a commercial business, dot edu is for schools, universities and educational institutes, and dot org is for community, not-for-profit, and political organisations.

Also think about why someone has decided to collect and publish this information, and look at the type of language used.

The Healthline page has a lot of advertisements, and the language on their About page is more emotional than what you would see in, for example, your textbook.

The Michigan Medicine page is designed to give information to the cardiac surgery patients at their clinic, but it does have some marketing purpose, since they're offering their appointments and services on the site,

And Wikipedia is a not-for-profit organisation aiming to share knowledge, and their editors are told to use a neutral point of view, but ask yourself whether the individual contributors have stuck to that purpose?

Lastly we ask if the website is reliable, how much can we trust the information?

You will need to use your own knowledge of the topic, and your learnings from class, to assess whether the information on a website is accurate, and therefore reliable.

Another way to assess reliability is to check whether any sources or references are listed, and whether those sources are high-quality.

The Wikipedia page has over a hundred sources given, and most seem to be either peer-reviewed articles or reports by well-respected organisations like the WHO, World Heart Federation and US National Institute of Health.

The Healthline page lists seven sources, which are a mix of peer-reviewed articles and some websites. Some of those are by government or medical institutions, others are consumer-focused sites similar to Healthline.

The Michigan medicine page only lists one source - the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.

Remember you may also need to read the source itself to make sure the website you're assessing has interpreted that source correctly.

Now, gather up all your thoughts and decisions about each website. You can use any ranking or rating system that works for you.

So, what do you think? Having looked at each of these websites, would you use them for your assignments? If so, when would you use them?

Would you use them just for background reading? Maybe to find other more authoritative sources from the footnotes? Maybe to find accurate images or video? Or as a final reference in your assignment?

If you need more help assessing websites, or with anything to do with research and referencing, go to www.qut.edu.au/help