Who Can Create Quality Labels?
The short answer is: anyone can create a quality label or contribute by adding their rating to an existing label. Label ratings can then be aggregated to calculate a trust level for a given label. Some key examples of organisations or people who might wish to create their own quality labels are:
| Type of organisation or person | Role and characteristics |
| Labelling Authority | To check content against a list of criteria – often several categories which can include reliability of information, service levels and information, etc. |
| Commercial financial service provider | Guarantees secure financial transactions for online commerce. |
| Domain expert e.g. medical professionals, university researchers and professors | May assess content on a specific subject area and may have a specialised topic vocabulary. |
| Teachers and providers of content for children | Typically are assessing websites for suitability for minors and will use a limited set of broad descriptors. |
| Professional organisations, associations and clubs | Interested in resources to share with colleagues for work purposes – descriptors likely to be subject specific but not as detailed as for a domain expert. |
| Communities of interest | E.g. parents groups, societies and people with common interests. Descriptors are likely to quite general, applying to resources recommended to others within the group. |
Anyone can add their own rating to an existing quality label using the QSN tool. Labels provided by Labelling Authorities and financial services providers are considered highly trustworthy – corporate reputations are at stake and time and effort has been invested in obtaining the quality labels. Ratings for labels are very useful for end users where quality labels may have been created by individuals who may not be part of a specific organisation; ratings can increase the trust level in a quality label where lots of different people have agreed with the label. MyWot is an example of where the rating criteria is aggregated together to create an overall set of ratings for each website that people have contributed to – a ‘community’ label which helps build trust.
Quality labels can vary widely in complexity and detail. For example, a Labelling Authority may have a policy or code of conduct that labelled content or service providers must agree to follow as well detailed criteria that describe the website or service itself. Codes of conduct are likely to cover aspects such as how complaints and queries are dealt with, what information is provided to clients who buy products and services, and they may stipulate that advertising must be clearly identifiable as such. At the other end of the scale, a very simple quality label may have a very small set of criteria that each website or resource set is checked against e.g. has a data privacy policy, is suitable for children, is factually accurate, etc.
An Example: The Youth Panel Label
Quatro Plus ran pilots with three Safer Internet Youth Panels based in Greece, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Sixteen descriptors were agreed upon by the participants which indicated both positive and negative characteristics of websites each visited and evaluated using the QSN tool. The positive characterisations are:
- valuable consulting content;
- valuable educational content;
- promotion of humanitarian values;
- promotion of environmental issues.
- promotion of children rights
- entertainment, educational games
One of the ‘negative’ characteristics is user-generated content as this may be an issue if the author has a false identity, writes inaccurate content or untruths. User-generated content is not necessarily negative but needs flagging. The negative descriptors are:
- user generated content;
- information trustworthiness;
- violence;
- personal data infringement;
- incitement to annorexia, drugs, illegal activities;
- vulgar language;
- disguised advertising;
- sexual content;
- hate, racism and xenophobia;
- gambling.
These are all features that the youth panels agreed make websites unsuitable for children. These descriptors make up the Youth Panel vocabulary. An example of a quality label which used some of these descriptors encoded using POWDER can be found in the section Quatro Plus and POWDER.
