How do you know the answer to all questions?

WikiAnswers gets answers from our volunteers. Anybody can volunteer, so your question could be answered by someone who actually knows what they're talking about, or it could be answered by a bored second grader making a potty humor joke.

Sometimes the answer itself will give you a clue as to whether it might be right: an answer that is grammatically correct, spelled properly, cites sources and contains details is more likely to be true than a one Word answer that's misspelled.

You can also check the "trust" level of the answerer. Below the answer will be the name of the contributor if they're registered and that user's trust level, or an IP address. An answer by a registered user is slightly more likely to be correct than one that's just an IP address, and an answer by a registered user with a high trust level is a good indication that the answer is either correct or that someone at least believes it's correct.

Where do the volunteers get the answers? Depends on the question and the answerer. For myself, some I know off the top of my head, and some I can find quickly by searching because I know how to ask the right questions of search engines and quickly assess the validity of the various sources displayed. I might, for example, not know what the molecular structure of paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin is, but I can look at the pages displayed when I search for it and pretty quickly divide them into "credible" or "not credible". (Try that search for yourself, by the way, if you're not offended by brief strong language; it's a hoot.)