Evaluating Websites

Today we learned about how to evaluate websites to help verify the information that is presented on the sites. First off, we visited the Quality Information Checklist website also known as QUICK. We were presented with the task of completing the first and third assignment on the website which included verifying the information on some mock websites and telling which website out of two choices had the best information. Out of the two websites -which were both pretty ridiculous- I have to say that the AFDB website was more reliable for a few reasons. One it gave us some contact information to people associated with the product. And it did tell us when the last update was even though it was a few years old (2008). On the other side though, the Google Gulp page was a much worse website, it called people not cool if they didn't use their product and the privacy policy was not very clear or secure either. It told us that our personal information was held at the Google Gulp HQ whose coordinates was only known by Eric Schmidt and also said that its coordinates were held in a metal briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. So in the end even though both were pretty ridiculous, I would have to say that the AFDB website was the most reliable.
The next part of the assignment was to have a fake research report on a city called Mankato in Minnesota. where we had to determine which given sites would be the best to use for valid information.The first site offered was very unreliable since it didn't give us any contact information and it was clearly written to persuade one to visit the city and seemed very biased. The second site seemed very... legitimate. the first thing that caught me was the fact that the URL ended in ".gov" and the latest news article on the home page was all about the current date and it offered a phone number to call if there were any questions.The next site, was the infamous Wikipedia, which I home everybody knows is a bad place to get information, unless they plan to use the cited sources posted by others. In the end I had to say that the obvious winner was the second website.