Guide to Comparative Politics on the Internet

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4. ASSESSING WEBSITES

The range and quality of information is immense; making sense of it requires the same skills as interpreting non-internet information, plus additional ruthlessness in disposing of irrelevant, low-grade and out-of-date material. How can we judge the accuracy, objectivity and comprehensiveness of internet material?

Sources do not need to be perfect to be useful. Sometimes, we are just interested in finding a particular fact or statistic, a task for which a simple query through a search engine is ideal. Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are also helpful here though Wikipedia entries, being based on contributions from users, should be checked for accuracy.

Often, we are interested in what a government, interest group or political party has to say in and of itself. What an organization says - on its website or elsewhere - is significant, whether or not it accurately reflects the views of individuals within the organization. So for this purpose, too, a trawl through the relevant sites is valuable.

Most often, however, we use internet resources as a guide to an external reality and we want to judge the value of internet information accordingly. There is no magic formula for doing this but here are some guidelines (most of which also apply to hard-copy documents):

• does the author have an interest in giving a selective account?
• is the site produced by a named person or organization (‘the author’)?
• does the reputation of the author depend on the accuracy of its information?
• what expertise does the author possess and demonstrate?
• how well do the author’s views chime with other sources?
• does the site appear long on opinion and short on fact?
• is the information current? (often a website is the last medium to be updated)

When any organization discusses itself, expect a uniformly positive and intensely selective presentation. All such bodies – including charities, churches, government departments and universities - highlight their successes and underplay their failures. The facts as presented are partial and the overall interpretation is biased. Lies are rare but half-truths are everywhere.

It is the observer’s job to think about what the website leaves out. The way to do this is through comparing one source against other (including interviews with staff or observers) until an overall picture develops. Outside analysts, such as journalists and academics, are useful in giving a more balanced insight. So the websites produced by institutions can provide a useful introduction and source of facts but the information is unlikely to be complete or deep. It supplements but does not replace academic writing on the topic. Good research requires more than a search through the sites. Be careful of allowing the content of partial sites to shape your agenda in ways of which you unaware.

See also Learn the Net and the World Wide Web Virtual Library.