HowStuff Works

HowStuffWorks - www.howstuffworks.com/ - 3 Stars

HowStuffWorks is a really fun site and very informative. It provides articles on how things work from "British Titles of Nobility" to "Comets". The articles are in plain English as benefits the general audience they target.

Most importantly, it is not the public that contributes the articles like Wikipedia. Instead, the contributers are genuine experts, including lawyers and PhDs, working in the field they are asked to write about. One can click on the authors name to see their credentials. In doing so, one does find that some authors write on topics that they don't have an obvious expertise and there is nothing said about what their qualification to write on that topic is. This is troublesome. However, from what I can gather, for some topics it is presumed that an ability to research and write effectively is important. Obvious efforts are taken to research topics as many articles include acknowledgments to other experts for their assistance.

The site is well designed, but it is a bit more cluttered than I usually prefer.