Trustworthiness criteria for supporting users to assess the credibility of web information

• Authors: Jarutas Pattanaphanchai;Kieron O'Hara;Wendy Hall
• Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion
• Year: 2013

Assessing the quality of information on the Web is a challenging issue for at least two reasons. First, as a decentralized data publishing platform in which anyone can share nearly anything, the Web has no inherent quality control mechanisms to ensure that content published is valid, legitimate, or even just interesting. Second, when assessing the trustworthiness of web pages, users tend to base their judgments upon descriptive criteria such as the visual presentation of the website rather than more robust normative criteria such as the author's reputation and the source's review process. As a result, Web users are liable to make incorrect assessments, particularly when making quick judgments on a large scale. Therefore, Web users need credibility criteria and tools to help them assess the trustworthiness of Web information in order to place trust in it. In this paper, we investigate the criteria that can be used to collect supportive data about a piece of information in order to improve a person's ability to quickly judge the trustworthiness of the information. We propose the normative trustworthiness criteria namely, authority, currency, accuracy and relevance which can be used to support users' assessments of the trustworthiness of Web information. In addition, we validate these criteria using an expert panel. The results show that the proposed criteria are helpful. Moreover, we obtain weighting scores for criteria which can be used to calculate the trustworthiness of information and suggest a piece of information that is more likely to be trustworthy to Web users.