Website evaluation questions
- Content quality & reliability
- Functionality & usability
Some questions to ask about quality
Our old friends: who, what, when, why, and "what do money and power have to do with it?" (Or, for Tina Turner fans and the spiritually-inclined, "what's love got to do with it?")Who is responsible for this site? (That is, does it tell you who wrote the words, drew the pictures, chose the links, designed the page, manages the computer, owns the computer, etc.? Do you trust them? Do you have reasons to distrust them? Do they seem to be "sharing" or "selling"?)
Can you tell who the page is intended for, and why?
Can you tell when this page was made? (Is its information up to date? Does that matter?)
What gives you a sense of the authority of the page? Is it internally consistent? Does it make it easy to find answers to questions? Does it make any arguments and back them up with facts -- and with other sources to check the facts? (Or do you have other sources you can check?) How much "content" is really there? Could you be distracted or fooled by slick graphics and fancy animation? Do those things mean someone has a big budget? Does that mean they spent all their money on programmers and marketing, not on research and reporting?
What's "authority" anyway?
Compare:
- court decisions and government decrees
- the official "public record"
- public debate & scrutiny (i.e. of politicians' speeches, truth of advertising claims, reliability of the media, etc.)
- the role of the press as public watchdog
- editors and reporters as scrutinizers
- reporters, editors and publishers as "gatekeepers"
- scientific or academic publishing and "peer review"
- watchdog agencies like FDA, FTC over some commercial speech
What's "publishing" anyway?
A.J. Liebling, media critic at the New Yorker magazine in the 1950s, coined the phrase, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." But today, a $20-a-month America Online account means you have the use of a more powerful "press" than anyone imagined in the 1950s. It moves your words and pictures around the world at the speed of light, with very little "interference" from outside, partly because the Net is technically difficult to control. (If something you wanted to publish was declared illegal, you could use a server in Finland or Antigua.) But, to paraphrase Uncle Dave at ATN, "This isn't an information highway, it's an information landfill. People are just dumping information out there. We aren't surfers, we're ragpickers."So how do we judge quality?
Various levels of quality of a work, or ways of judging what "quality" means, are needed in various kinds of "publishing."
Academic & Commercial text publishing
- get a passing grade for a paper (an audience of one)
- get a paper accepted by a regional conference (a committee decision)
- get it accepted at a national conference (another committee)
- get it accepted by an academic journal (an editor and reviewers)
- get it accepted by a book publisher (editorial and sales staff)
- get it accepted as a text by other teachers (reviewers and individuals)
- get it accepted by the public at large as a best seller (us)
- have it quoted by other writers and become part of "the literature" (us & them)
News
- (for a public relations person) get your press release accepted by the subjecct
- (for a public relations person) get your press release read by a reporter
- (for a reporter) get a story past your bureau chief
- (for a reporter) get a story past the city or state editor
- (for a reporter) get a story on page one
- (for a reporter) have the competition, TV and AP pick up the story
- (for a reporter) win an award for a story
- (for a reporter) get sued over the story
- (and have the Supreme Court say you were right, or at least not wrong)
Are these the same things as:
- being cool?
- being hot?
- being right?
- beauty?
- truth?
- honesty?
- dignity?
- honor?
- love?