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My Ninjas are Already Watching You
Your statement both reinforces my point and shows the misperception about aggregators. You are exactly correct in saying OmniNerd is not an authoritative site. It's never claimed to be.
For instance, if I were arguing that particular driving habits are absolutely influential on fuel economy and simply said - "because OmniNerd said so" than by all means, call me an idiot and dismiss the source. But if I make the statement that the driving habit of using an air conditioner at high speed burns more gas than driving at high RPM in the wrong gear and cited the researched and experimental data from Improve MPG: The Factors Affecting Fuel Efficiency than I would be making a valid reference worth citing.
The article itself stands by itself. Just as you may have researched and written a fantastic paper in college but been a complete dud at every other class you took. Does that take away from the reference quality of the paper? Absolutely not. If it stands on its own and can serve to educate someone else, than it serves its purpose and does it well.
So the fact that a compendium of community knowledge would simply dismiss an article that is highly relevant to its topic as "poor quality" just based on who is hosting it is ridiculous. For years an article I'd written on another site was well regarded by Wikipedia as authoritative ... but when I ported it to ON and changed the link it was immediately blacklisted. I changed it back to the old link (the exact same content!!) and the editor seemed perfectly content again. That to me is evidence the editing is not based on any sense of verification on content but rather simply whims that suit whoever "claims ownership" of a Wikipedia entry.
So like I said, your comment that individual articles "re well-written and researched, but people associate authority with a narrower field of expertise" is on target. But that should make somebody wonder. Are magazines like Popular Mechanics that feature an excellent article on home building authorities in that field? No. But the author who wrote that article and did that research may be. It's really the same thing.
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RE: Wikipedia, or not?
I agree with the previous poster. There is a wold of difference between what you think your website is (i.e. an authority site) and what it is actually perceived as (well, whatever it is perceived as in this case, not by you and your spouse, but by the average joe). Don't mean to play down the importance of the articles posted here, because they are well-written and researched, but people associate authority with a narrower field of expertise. Is there such a thing for OmniNerd? I don't believe so. Now, if ON were actually OmniNerd for Oil Independence and all you wrote was articles on gas saving tips and peak oil and how global warming is really a hoax perpetrated by the liberal media hawks, then you will probably have a better time trying to convince Wikipedia that you are an authoritative site.
I agree with you though that authority at some point is defined rather subjectively, but still, I don't think ON should not be delusional in believing it will make the list of references in Encyclopedia Britannica (or its more popular, less noble counterpart which is Wikipedia).
On the other hand, if VnutZ were to start a blog hosted on an independent and famed blog platform and build an audience and become an authority for ninja saber fighting, then Vnutz will be quoted on Fox News maybe and then he could say that he is a founding member of ON, an "anything-nerdy-goes" website.
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