Negocios

Raquel Medrano Nakaoka
COMPARING SOURCES

Nowadays internet is a very important and indispensable source of information. Actually there are certain countries whose percentage of households with Internet exceeds 80%, such as Germany or Japan. In Spain almost 27 millions of people has Internet access. Normally most people attach full credence to any information you find in most web pages, andthen we use it in different aspects of our daily lives. But, are these sites completely reliable? Is it possible that we are using certain erroneous knowledge? Therefore, I will do a brief investigation on how we can find out if the information that certain websites give us is reliable or not. To do that, I will focus my research in five different criteria that I will explain now.

In my opinion,one of the most importants and the first fact that we have to take into account, is about the author and the sources of information. How can we know if the information is reliable? Well, in most of the cases the author is the responsable on writting and updating the information into the internet, so before we rely on the information we are receiving, we should take a look at the author, which issomething that almost nobody does. We have to look if we are able to verify the information, looking if the sources are stated, and if the author is named, searching it in the header and footer information .
In the case where the author is named, we should check his credentials, and know if the author is specialized in the field we are searching for; because if for example we are looking for anarticle about economy and we find one written by an expert un medicine it wouldn’t be probably the best article for us, we could find a better one.
Another important aspect it’s that depending on the author or sources, there may be included more a point of view (such as for example about a religion, politics, etc.), or some kind of marketing, than an objective and transparent information. Such asfor example if we are reading an article about the taxes on gasoline and it is written by Repsol, they will probably try to make some propaganda of their company. So to resolve these problem we can look the type of domain where it comes from, such as for example goverment sites (look for .gov, .mil) or aducational sites (look for .edu).


Another important aspect is how frecuently the resourceis updated. Currently we usually don’t look when the information was updated, but we could be reading an article that was updated a year ago without knowing it. So that’s why it is important for us to look if the page is dated. It depends on what kind of information you are looking for, for some topics you may need actual information, but for others you may need an information from the past. In thecase that you are looking for recent information you must check if the wed page is current enough, because there are some pages which are constantly renewing its information.


The next criteria I’m going to evaluate is about the innovation and utility that the information which the web site gives to us, has. First of all we must check if the information that the site is giving us it is usefuland if it is an information easy to understand and operate. If the web site is giving us an information that is hard to carry with, it will probably be better to search for a new one which is clearer. It is also important that the site focus on what you're looking for and that it will not lead to different issues and needlessly lengthen.


The fourth criteria in which I’m going to focus is thesite structure. We should check the web page and look at its composition. Does it have graphical images? Do these images enhance the resource or distract from the content? These is an important aspect. In my opinion, the graphical images are important, because they usually help you understanding and to imagine the information you are reading. Although, there can be some confusing images that...