Once you decide which pieces of information are actually useful to your project, you need to evaluate that information for its overall reliability and trustworthiness.
There are six basic criteria for evaluating information regardless of the format in which that information is contained. When used together they indicate the basic reliability of that piece of information. This does not mean that you will always need to use all six to reach a reasonable conclusion about the reliability of information. Once you understand these criteria, you will be able to use them more or less simultaneously.
The six basic criteria for evaluating information are:
In addition to these basic criteria there are logical fallacies Logical Fallacies and the presence or absence of documentation. If logical fallacies are present, they can invalidate an argument or conclusion. You need to learn to recognize the most important of these fallacies and understand how they affect the validity of the conclusion being presented. If documentation is absent or not reputable then the reliability of the information is open to question.
