🚀 go-pugleaf

Diane,

I teach a team presentation "Navigating the Internet", we use six criteria
to evaluate an Internet resource.

Authority ~ Who is the creator?
Currency ~  How up to date is it?
Quality/Reliability ~ Is the info accurate?
Scope ~ How inclusive is the info?
Fairness ~ Is the material biased?
Aesthetic Quality ~ Organization, style/design, technical capabilities

I like to tell the participants about how to use the URL to *assist* in
determining where the page resides, and what organization or individual is
responsible for a particular resource.

For instance, you can tell you are at the "real" Whitehouse
homepage by the URL www.whitehouse.gov instead of the pornographic site
www.whitehouse.com by the domain name.

I point out that the tilde ~ usually indicates a page created by an
individual such as a college or faculty member at a college or university.
This doesn't mean that the page is bad, but it probably does mean that
the institution in question is not directly responsible for the content of
that page or pages.

I wouldn't ever make a blanket statement such as .com is bad .edu is
good...  But I wouldn't ignore URLs entirely either : )

Shawn Andary, System Administrator
UP Region of Library Cooperation
1615 Presque Isle Ave.
Marquette, MI 49855

On Tue, 20 Oct 1998, Diane K. Kovacs wrote:

> Dear Nettrainers,
> I've been convinced that someone is in fact using the subscriber list to
> spam other subscribers.  People who have never posted are getting the spam
> in question. I've set the list to Review=Owner, which means only Jim and I
> can retrieve the list of subscribers now.  If you need to check your own
> subscription options please ask me and I'll send them to you.  Let's get
> back to the topic of Internet Training now?
>
> I'd like to readdress an issue that we've discussed before.  How to teach
> people how to evaluate Internet resources.  Specifically, I've encountered
> several students who've been told by some Internet trainer's (unnamed) that
> you can judge whether information on a Web page is of high quality
> (factual, timely, relatively unbiased) by looking at the domain names...I
> was told that one trainer told one of my students:  .edu is good .com is
> bad and that anything with ~  in it is bad.  What are your opinions on
> this?  Mine immediate reaction is to say that the domain name of a site in
> no way can be used as a guide to evaluate the content of a site.  Am I
> wrong?  What is the reality from your points of view?
>
> Cordially,
> Diane
> Nettrain Editor
>