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The Web and the Credibility Gap -- Why It Should Matter to You
(Oct 2008) The transformation of the Web from a domain only site managers could change to a more democratic forum where more people can add or alter content using so-called Web 2.0 applications has created a problem -- how do you know if what you're reading is credible?
The challenges of "participatory information use environments" are under study by Associate Professor Soo Young Rieh at the School of Information through a $430,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Rieh wants to know how people assess the credibility of information and what credibility assessment heuristics they employ when they engage in diverse information activities on the Web, such as posting documents, creating news summaries, adding comments, tagging items, giving ratings, and making recommendations. Her study will look at information on blogs, wikis, online community sites, and social networking sites.
"The Web 2.0 environment produces new types of information generated by end-users and made accessible to the general public," Rieh says.
The troubling aspect, she adds, is that some Web users may not immediately be able to distinguish how this type of information differs from that created by professional writers, publishers, journalists, and scholars. This user-generated content phenomenon is particularly prominent on sites dealing with news where readers add comments about the original content that was published by established institutional sources.
"The problem of credibility assessment is more critical than ever in Web 2.0 because credibility assessment heuristics that people have adopted when searching for information on static Web sites may not be applicable in this new participatory environment," Rieh says.
"For instance, people have relied on source reputation in the traditional print environment and they have continued to use these criteria in their evaluation of information on the Web."
The problem is, with Web 2.0 people find it difficult to identify the origin of a source because information is widely disseminated through participatory Web sites and is disconnected from established, reputable institutional sources.
"This emerging yet increasingly popular type of information -- user-generated content -- has not been examined previously by credibility researchers," Rieh says. "In fact, credibility research has largely ignored more diverse information activities that people conduct for creating and mediating user content in the Web 2.0 environment."
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