Evaluating Credibility of Resources

Knowing how the evaluate the credibility of a resource is a critical skill, especially with websites. For technical writing, think about this from the perspective of the work world: if you're writing a report for your boss, your clients, or stakeholders in a project you're working on, your credibility is only as good as the sources you cite. That makes the sources you cite really important, and you need to know they're good ones.

So, how can you know a website is credible? Here are some elements to look for and evaluate:

• Author & Authority: who’s the individual or organization responsible for creating the page? What are their qualifications and credentials? If you can’t find this information fairly easily, you should proceed very cautiously.
• Objectivity and transparency: what’s the purpose for the page? What’s the tone of the writing? Is there a bias towards a particular point of view? A bias of some sort certainly doesn’t mean that a site isn’t credible, but it is important for you to be aware of what the site is trying to accomplish. Hint: Look for an “about” page to help you answer some of these questions.
• Citations: Do the site’s authors cite their sources so you can verify any factual information presented on the cite? Do they support their opinions with evidence? If not, it’s probably not a credible site.
• Accuracy: is the information on the page accurate? Are there spelling and grammatical errors? These may indicate how much time and effort has gone into working on the page.
• Currency: Is the page content up to date? When was the last time content was posted? Do all the links and multimedia content work? Currency may be more important with some topics than with others. Some once-credible sites may have become out of date (this can be true with government sites, where sites sometimes die with the funding for a particular project).
• "Spam" content: how many ads are on the page? Do links go to contextually-related content, or are they just more ads? The presence of ads doesn't automatically disqualify a site; almost all sites have a least a few ads. But, be aware that there are many sites that exist just for advertising. These sites are cluttered with ads, often copy content directly from other sites, and offer very little in the way of useful information.
• Do NOT rely on domain name alone to determine if a site is good or not! .Edu sites sometimes contain student projects or other personal pages. Anyone can register for a .org domain name, for any reason. The .gov domain is restricted to US government use, but you still need to be aware of issues like currency.