Zero, single, or multi? Genre of web pages through the users' perspective

The goal of the study presented in this article is to investigate to what extent the classification of a web page by a single genre matches the users' perspective. The extent of agreement on a single genre label for a web page can help understand whether there is a need for a different classification scheme that overrides the single-genre labelling. My hypothesis is that a single genre label does not account for the users' perspective. In order to test this hypothesis, I submitted a restricted number of web pages (25 web pages) to a large number of web users (135 subjects) asking them to assign only a single genre label to each of the web pages. Users could choose from a list of 21 genre labels, or select one of the two 'escape' options, i.e. 'Add a label' and 'I don't know'. The rationale was to observe the level of agreement on a single genre label per web page, and draw some conclusions about the appropriateness of limiting the assignment to only a single label when doing genre classification of web pages. Results show that users largely disagree on the label to be assigned to a web page. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.