It has become a reflex reaction in the digital age. If you have a question that needs an answer or a fact to check, simply head online and tap it into Google. More often than not you will be directed to Wikipedia, where the answer is laid out for you.

The only problem is, it may not be the right answer.

Though many of us have come to rely on the online encyclopedia, every entry in it is available for anyone to edit, so you can’t always trust what you find there.

Fortunately, there are numerous more accurate resources on the web.

The trick is knowing where to look for them.

BE WARY OF WIKIS

Loathe it or love it, there’s no escaping Wikipedia. However, the weaknesses of the site are frequently exposed (see, for example, the Times Online article about the senior Wikipedia editor who claimed to be a university professor but was actually a student at www.tinyurl.com/2ebqx3). That’s not to say much information on the site is factually inaccurate – you just need to be careful. It’s best to view the site as a starting point: allow it to point you in the right direction (say, a website cited as a source on the Wikipedia page), but always be wary.

When reading an article, check the references at the bottom - are they books or websites? If websites, are they reliable? You can also keep track of how often a page is updated, and by whom, by clicking on the “edit this page” tab at the top. This can show if details have been vandalised.

A newer, more reliable alternative is Citizendium (en.citizendium.org). It was started by a Wikipedia founder and employs the same idea that anyone can write for the site, but it claims to use a team of vetted experts to make sure articles are accurate, and contributors are all required to use their own names rather than hiding behind aliases. It cannot compete in size: in its first year, only about 4,500 articles have been submitted, compared with 2.1m (in English alone) held by its big sister.

REFERENCE SOURCES

As an alternative to Wikipedia, try www.refdesk.com. This portal offers links to all manner of free dictionaries and encyclopedias, such as Microsoft’s Encarta, which has 42,000 articles. Conscientious researchers also have the option to head to sites with a better academic pedigree. Drawing together a range of global public-domain academic resources (of varying quality), www.ibiblio.org is worth dredging if you have a wide field of inquiry – cultural development in China, say.

For definitive statistics on any country in the world, the CIA World Factbook (www.tinyurl.com/2b2kg9) takes some beating. It contains up-to-date figures on everything from population to climate, life expectancy to natural resources and territorial disputes.

The vast caverns of music, film and video-game criticism at www.allmusic.com will sate the hungriest appetite for trivia, and those searching for obscure pop chart statistics should pay a visit to www.everyhit.com, one man’s Herculean effort to catalogue every British chart hit since 1952.

Courtesy of the Wisden Almanack, www.cricinfo.com is the definitive reference source for cricket trivia. For linguistic matters, try www.wordreference.com, which gives comprehensive definitions of words in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and English.

When you are researching specific topics, www.ask.com is a better search engine than Google, as it gives subcategories to narrow your search. Entering “Benjamin Disraeli”, for example, turned up material on his quotes, his political career and his novels, as well as on his great rival William Gladstone. Scholar.google.co.uk is a good starting point for scientific and scholarly research, as it allows you to search for papers and articles in the public domain.

WHAT’S WORTH PAYING FOR?

While generous and welcome efforts have made much knowledge available free, sometimes it’s worth paying. That is the rationale at www.britannica.co.uk, to which an annual subscription costs £40. Its pushy sign-up pages hardly set the right tone, but it is an excellent source of factual information.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com) is another good example, with in-depth biographies of 56,000 individuals, all meticulously sourced and verified, and accessible for £229 a year.

Scientific publishers run increasingly slick online databases that draw on their arsenal of academic journals. A search on www.blackwell-synergy.com turned up 489 articles on “plant mitochondria”, for example. Older ones are available for free, but expect to pay £15-£20 for up-to-date papers. The big US publishers have similar indexes of all their content: Elsevier at www.sciencedirect.com and Wiley at www.interscience.wiley.com

REACH INTO THE PAST

Ever since Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press, mankind has been able to mass produce learning, and the web plays its part with the publication of important works that have passed out of copyright. For example, the entire 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (with contributions from Algernon Swinburne and Bertrand Russell) is now online in various forms and costs nothing. The easiest to explore is www.1911encyclopedia.org, if you can stomach the constant adverts. It’s a fascinating snapshot of its time and, as the faintly repugnant entry on slavery illustrates, a telling reminder that knowledge is always subject to the values of its times.

A fascinating wealth of official information can be found at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. In addition to every census between 1841 and 1901, it contains government and military papers and key texts such as the Magna Carta and Shakespeare’s will.

The handsome collection of classic works at www.bartleby.com would grace any college library. Read the King James Bible, the 1907-21 edition of the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, poetry by Keats and Eliot and novels such as Crime and Punishment in their entirety.

SPECIALIST ANSWERS

If you’re in a hurry, or simply can’t find what you are looking for, you can always ask an expert. Texperts (www.texperts.com, or 66000 from your mobile phone) is a service that delivers answers to mobile phone; a response to the old chestnut “Why is the sky blue?” was concise, prompt (given within three minutes) and, most important, correct. Answers cost £1, but if you are unhappy with them you can follow up free of charge, and if the Texperts can’t answer your question you don’t have to pay the next time.

In comparison, typing such queries into answers.yahoo.com (where web surfers answer one another’s questions) can provide confused or incorrect responses. However, it can be a good place to go because often you will be pointed towards a website that does give the right answer.

The boffins at www.askoxford.com run their own “Ask the experts” service, but, disappointingly, instead of cyber-time with some of the preeminent brains of our time, the reader is faced with a thin selection of Frequently Asked Questions.