Abstract
In recent years, the Internet has become an indispensable way for users to find information which is almost instantaneously available. However, the presence of information on different websites makes the user needs to pre-check the credibility of the selected websites. Most users find it difficult to assess website credibility in terms of its particular characteristics or factors. Accordingly, we proposed an automated evaluation tool which considers various factors to assess the credibility of different websites and rank them from the highest credibility score to the lowest in order to allow the user to select the most credible website. We used the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMOTHEE). The latter is one of the Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods (MCDM). It combines pairwise comparison and outranking methods in order to give more accurate and superior credibility scores due to its enrichment evaluations. For the proposed tool to be acceptable, we carried out a correlation analysis to determine the coefficient of correlation between human judges and the proposed tool. We found the coefficient of correlation rho is 0.943 which indicates that there is a strong correlation between the human judges’ ranking and the ranking given by the proposed website evaluation tool.
Highlights
Today’s generation relies on the web to allow access to vast amounts of information
We hypothesize that our proposed tool can give valid credibility scores of websites and results in a strong correlation between the human judges ranking and ranking assigned by our proposed tool
It is evident that the results are statistically significant at a level of 0.01 since the calculated p-value is 0.005 which is less than the set value of 0.01. This indicates that there is a strong correlation between the human judges ranking and ranking by the PROMETHEE website tool
Summary
Today’s generation relies on the web to allow access to vast amounts of information. The existence of many websites that provide knowledge about seemingly limitless topics makes an individual's life more productive. Due to the open nature of the web, anybody can own a website and distribute information; the problem arises in that such websites lack any verification of their credibility. Credible webpages should possess a high level of trustworthiness and demonstrate proper expertise These two factors include the criteria that the website is professionally designed and logically arranged. It is important to support users with the proper tools to assist them in evaluating website credibility to prevent them from being influenced by misleading information. Thereupon, users become more confident about the websites they are visiting because they were previously unable to differentiate if these websites were credible or not They will be able to achieve a better understanding of the content.
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