Abstract

Educating internet users how to gain, evaluate and effectively use information on their own has become one of the pillars of the set of information literacy skills promoted and implemented in schools and at universities. This is why pupils, students and teachers (including academic ones) also need to know how to evaluate the credibility of internet websites.

The aim of the paper is to determine the importance of the criteria for evaluating the credibility of internet websites. The author attempts to answer the following questions:

- How can a general list of criteria be generated to evaluate the credibility of websites? - Which of the criteria can be considered the most important ones?

To determine the importance of the criteria, the paper uses a survey method and a questionnaire research technique. The survey and questionnaire were applied to students of the Opole universities.

The pilot research made it possible to establish the ranking of importance for a set of 15 criteria for evaluating / assessing the credibility of a website. According to the respondents, the most important criteria for evaluating the credibility of a website include references to other content. The respondents believe that deficiencies in the protection of information against damage do not have any considerable influence on the credibility of a website. The least important of all the evaluation criteria is incomprehensible language.

Keywords: credibility, website, evaluation criteria, importance, ranking

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