Monday, February 2, 2015

CRAAP Test

www.justfacts.com

C- JustFacts has quite the currency issue. While the lastest article was published on January        21, 2015 there are articles that haven't been updated since 2013. If the site reported on static topics then this wouldn't be that bad, however they are talking on things that change everyday!

R- Due to the categorical organization of the site it is very easy to pick your topic and read only about that. The information is very extensive and laid out in an easy to read easy to understand manner.

A-  The site mainly credits two people for it's information, and though their qualifications are listed they don't really match up. What I mean is, the facts are about political or social issues and the authors are experts in engineering and psychology. A better fit might be a political science expert. This makes me feel like the site is very opinionated but its a non profit site funded by donations which lessens the suspicion of bias.

A-  From the couple of articles I skimmed through the information seems to be accurate. A lot of figures seem to be off, but that is probably due to the info being slightly outdated. On the plus side, the figures are accurate for the time they were published. There are references which is a good indication of accuracy. The only allowance for any type of peer review that I saw was the option for readers to write in and point out errors.

P- The purpose of the sight is to provide information on global issues that people either don't know about or have a lot of conflicting, possibly false, information on.

www.factcheck.org

C- FactCheck does a very good job of keeping their website updated. There are multiple articles from today alone, and if there isn't an article every day you will at least see one that has been posted within the last seven days.

R- The options for research are limited to issues of politics and furthermore the only form of categorization is by politician. So if you were trying to find out President Obama's stance on gun control you would have to dig through his opinions on every other possible political debate first. Or if you wanted to know all about the issue of gun control you'd have to scan through essentially every article, on every politician.

A- The site is run by a group of people at the University of Pennsylvania who, according to their short biographies, are all well versed in some sort of politics. Their funds mostly come from grants from the founder and his family.

A- The information seems to be accurate although without cross referencing other sites there is no way to know that because no sources are cited. There are editors on the board to fact check but that doesn't say much if the information is purposely falsified.

P- The sites purpose is to expose the misleadings, exaggerations, and deceptions of politicians so voters can make a truly informed vote.

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