General Reference is not well-liked on SF.SE.  

Among other things, there's little agreement on what "standard Internet reference source" means.  Wikipedia and IMdB are about the only widely accepted reference sites.  There was a rancorous discussion recently of whether a *Google* was a true "reference" site i.e. if a question is well-answered by the top 5-10 hits of a Google search (but none of those are Wikipedia) is it GR?

The [most recent in-depth discussion][1] includes an [answer from Shog9 indicating that GR is likely to go away][2].

[Another answer][3] includes this reasoning, which makes sense to me:

> Why is it not sufficient to say "if a question is trivial, boring, and demonstrates little to no research, downvote it"? Note that the hover-text for downvoting states quite clearly that a question or answer should be downvoted when it "does not show any research effort" or "it is unclear or not useful"!

Downvote it and move on!


  [1]: http://meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2400/should-we-burninate-general-reference
  [2]: http://meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/a/2545/4167
  [3]: http://meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/a/2402/4167