Evaluating financial reports (posted by Donna Cohen August 10, 2002)
The SEC has populated the Web with some fake sites to educate people about website evaluation. Check out www.mcwhortle.com

Quality on the web (posted by Robert Berkman August 21, 2002)
Summary of Previous Posting:

Source of Information Evaluation Checklist, referred by Gary Price:
http://www.virtualchase.com/quality/

"We used to think that if the info was filed with a public/government source or with a reputable publisher, like for instance the SEC, then that was enough. In this post-Enron, Adelphia, Worldcom, IMClone, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose world I'm not sure that the site source is enough anymore. Now one has to consider the veracity of the individual authors!

But seriously, the most pressing issue I generally encounter is the same issue that I encounter with non-web-based info - finding a way to verify it. I usually try to find more than one source that says the same thing and triple check to see that nothing more recent has been published. If a particular fact or set of facts seems out of date I try to find something which explains why it is no longer current.

One of the difficulties that I often run into is that different sources slice and dice or name data inconsistently and that makes it difficult to pick the "right" one. An example of this is a search I had to run for a closing stock quote: Open/Close, Ask/Bid, Last/Final, % vs. fractions - no two sites had the exact same set of quotes for a particular stock price. There were too many "right" answers and no two agreed. We had to wait til the market opened the next day to get the definitive answer.

Another problem I encounter is when a "reliable" source becomes unreliable for a particular question. For example - I needed to come up with the correct list of names of a corporation's board of directors. If this were a casual question I would have relied on Hoover's or the proxy filing - but in this case they needed to know exactly who was currently on the board and in that scenario both Hoover's and the SEC were unreliable.

For the most part, tho, I rely on Hoover's, Wright's Research, sec.gov, google and yahoo! for my day to day business research needs.

The most difficult/pressing issue I have with judging the quality of business info on the Web is ascertaining/determining the DATE OF THE INFO. As you know, without the date, the information is almost worthless. Even good publishers seem to lose the concept of dating as simple a thing as an article when they move to the Web."

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Information Quality (World Wide Web Virtual Library) http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-InfoQuality.html

Evaluation of information sources (World Wide Web Virtual Library) http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm