Quality V Quantity

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Quality V Quantity

Nobody questions the quantity of information on the web but what about the quality.

If you buy a journal or magazine, you have a good idea of the standard of the material between the covers. Peer review and editorial controls set appropriate standards. But how do you spot quality in web?

The normal guidelines should, of course, be applied:

	The 'authority' of contributors is a good guide. But you need to have some knowledge of the subject to gauge this. Reputable sites recognise this and back up what they say biographic details of contributors so you can check them out.
	Large organisations are extremely jealous of their reputation so can be expected to police those contributing in their name.
	Topicality and regular updating are other good guides to quality. It is remarkable how many out-of-date sites there are.
	Do the advice-givers have a vested interest in the advice given?

Contra-indicators are not so easy to define:

Coming top in a search can be a good indicator but the search engines make no claim to extract quality. Ranking is often achieved through merit - The more people follow the link, the higher its ranking.

There are two caveats:

The web is a gift to ‘noisy and vexatious’ folk so a popular reputation can be misleading.
But search engines can be fooled. If you have tried searching for cheap flights, ferries or hotels you will have to wade through pages most of which all seem to be linked to a not-so-cheap site. This unscrupulous marketing ploy buries the really cheap offers in the hope that you will give up and pay top dollar.
Looking good tells you little about the quality of the material on a site. Some of the best material seems to pride itself in the crude look of its pages.

There are some serious issues associated with the quality and reliability of page content.

	Misleading health or lifestyle advice could have fatal consequences.
	Politically biased information can destabilise sensitive situations.
	Bad weather advice can have tragic consequences.
	Raising false expectations can crush the spirit or cause saving to be squandered on ill-considered projects.
	Bad business advice can bypass the regulators by operating beyond professional jurisdictions

It is not clear that all those dispensing advice take their responsibilities seriously. But against that must be set the mysterious benefit brought by the freedom of expression that the web gives to so many. There is good as well as bad information out there.

The web has facilitated the move from the centralized, intermittent publishing model to a distributed, continuous, and self-publishing model. It would be wonderful to preserve the quality and controls for the new media but that has passed from editors to the consumers. The moral must be ‘Caveat reader’.

Google and Amazon are all working to make the contents of published books available on the web which will make a substantial body of quality knowledge available on-line.

http://books.google.com/

Check out those stories

http://www.truthorfiction.com/

http://www.factorfictionblog.com/

Effort is being devoted to indexing quality content.

http://lii.org/

http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/

http://www.searchenginewatch.com

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© Charles Jones 2003-8