Keep these ABCs in mind as you review websites for quality:
Is the website's author listed along with his/her credentials? Usually a URL with .edu .org or.gov is more reliable than.com. and .net
Is the website objective, presenting both sides of an issue? Or, is the information presented to sway the audience to a particular point of view? Who is the audience? A certain political group, adults, children, researchers? Depending on your purpose for using the website, the intended audience needs to be taken into consideration.
Is the website current, providing the 'created' date and 'last updated' information?
Note: One or more of the ABCs may be more important in evaluating a website, depending on the information you need. Example: medical & scientific information usually needs to be current. If you are trying to take a stand on an issue, a biased database may be acceptable as long as it is coming from a reliable source (authority).
Check out AllSide's Media Bias Rating™ system. (Yep; they trade-marked it).
Of course, if you want to compare someone else's opinion of how a media website seems to lean with how it made you feel, to see if there seems to be a general consensus, you'll want to feel confident in how they come to whatever conclusion they hold.
AllSide's site says:
"AllSides balances the input of experts and ordinary people across the political spectrum so that our bias ratings reveal the average judgment of all Americans, not one elite group"
Okay; sounds reasonable so far. Read the site's description of how they create their media bias ratings. If you feel they've created a good system for coming to a more centrist, consensus sense of how a media site leans politically, AllSides may be a very useful tool to get a sense for what audience a website is talking to, and/or what the organization that made it is trying to achieve.
See the list of media sites AllSides already rated.
Paste a website URL into the search box and get an instant bias rating.
(Click on an article title to see the article where it is posted at the AllSides site, including the rating of the news source.)
You know the extensions at the very end of website domain names? The .com, .edu, .org, etc.? Well, those are called Top Level Domains (TLD).
During the 1990s as the internet as a network started to grow, there were only seven TLDs:
.com. (originally meant just for for-profit companies, but became something anyone could use)
.org (originally meant to be for charities or nonprofit organizations to provide valuable information for a specific purpose; now a more miscellaneous category, used by some orgs, but not restricted to just them - this one has been used by everything from regular NGOs - to white supremacist organizations putting up sites about Matin Luther King Jr in order to propagate calumny.
.net (anyone could use it)
.int (just for to organizations, offices, and programs endorsed by a treaty between two or more nations)
.edu (restricted to accredited secondary educational institutions)
.gov (restricted to us government)
.mil (just for the us dept. of defense)
In the decades since then, though, many MANY new TLDs/extensions have been created, everything from general terms, to specific company names or brand names. Some are restricted to a certain type of use, some are not. See the LONG list here (wikipedia).
The point being, when you know a domain extension is restricted to one entity to use (like universities and colleges, the government, or the military) that can be reassuring, as it can guide you to search on websites that you know from the start are pretty reliable.
But, if you see a webpage domain name with an extension that can be used by ANYONE or, one you've never seen before...you can't just assume that the website's information is going to be reliable without looking around and checking out other things about the website (such as the ABC method listed above).
