Asking the questions doesn't mean you want the facts

From Stayconscious

By now there’s more than a critical mass of general users out there using the internet regularly  — by which I mean fluently, and as their main source of factual information. 'The internet' has become almost as ubiquitous as the television in some societies (and in some income brackets). Many of us use it as our first resource to look up everything from getting a dialing area code to finding out the weather today.

And in the heady world of Web 2.0, many of the more obscure or localized facts are contributed by other ‘ordinary’ internet users. People who don't pretend to be experts (and people who DO pretend to be experts). A critical mass of co-operative and co-operating internet users may be enough to populate the web with a wealth of information  — but this doesn’t necessarily mean that this critical mass is particularly good at providing accurate facts. Sometimes the conditions aren't right for creating reliable answers  — but sometimes the answers have little to do with why the question was asked.

(Or perhaps it's just that people are incredibly lazy and it's easy to forget the difference between fact and opinion.)