Detective work!

Judging a website's usefulness and validity? It is not so easy!
Internet, to tell the truth, requires more critical efforts than other "traditional" media and mode, in that, while books, articles.. before to be published or printed have been checked by professional figures such as editors, publishers, reviewers…, on the Web anyone can put anything without any particular kind of supervision.
For this reason, every time we have to do a sort of "detective work"!!There are some fundamental tips at which we must to look, even if I think that unfortunately there is no a steady or standard checklist of rules to follow to evaluate a website.

Anyway, there are some points that are worthy to keep in mind. I think that the tips given in the three links in Bloggingenglish are a good guide in that, they clearly list those elements which, more or less consciously, we look for when reading online stuff.
The three sites put almost the same points, even if presented in different ways. Here I’m not going to list them as they are available typing their three respective URL.

Generally, I look at:

• the URL (for example, any educational institution in UK has a ".edu" net address which tells us that the source is reliable);
• the "authority", that is, the author’s identity and the name of the organisation with which he/she works;
• the date at which the information was published (and if the subject requires it, the date of the last update);
• the references (or sources) and links.

In particular, I think that citing sources is very, very important because it proves an honest work. In other words, the author didn’t plunder anybody else’s work (we-all know how much widespread the phenomenon of plagiarism is...it is sufficient to copy and paste passages without any apposite indications), on the contrary, he gives the reader the possibility of consulting personally the original sources.

Surfing the net, I found out another important tool I hadn't know before and that can help us to judge a website’s validity. It is Google’s advanced search "links" feature: filling the apposite space with the URL of the page you are considering, you can see what other sites link to it.

The last thing I would like to point out is that we have to read as much as possible about a matter and compare the different sources. If we don’t have a term of comparison, we can’t judge the content of a page, I mean, if the information is comprehensive and detailed, if something missed and so on. If we have to deepen a topic, we can’t stop at the first thing at hand, whether we are searching on the Web or in a bookshop and library.