If you have kids or like “Ripley’s Believe it Or Not” You’ll enjoy Life’s Little Mysteries, a Web site that answers all those random questions that you constantly wonder about. It’s available at http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/. It’s a terrific reference site, though it does in my opinion suffer from a lack of sourcing.

Life’s Little Mysteries is sort of like a question engine but human-powered, with extensive articles to answer the questions. So the data pool isn’t particularly wide, but it is pretty deep. The front page divides its answered questions into sections, like Body & Mind, Animals, and Just Plain Strange. Ancient mysteries (“Do Fish Sleep?”) exist side-by-side with more contemporary questions (“How Are Oil Spills Cleaned?”)

There is a keyword search available; a search for baseball found six results, including “Why Is Baseball Spring Training in Both Florida and Arizona?” and “Are Left-Handed People Smarter?” (the keyword search is a full-text search, so you will find questions that are far afield.) Questions are answered by articles that range from a couple hundred to several hundred words; terrific detail. I was surprised to see that while many articles had links, some that didn’t didn’t offer much sourcing. For example, “Why Is Baseball Spring Training in Both Florida and Arizona?” offers several quotes and dates, none of them are sourced in the article that I can see.

I bring this up because of the quality of the site wranglers, which you can read about here. Several of the staffers have journalism or science degrees, and that’s one of the reasons I decided to cover this resource. So I know research has been done to create these articles, so why not source it?

Though the site has just launched, it looks like there have been articles added since at least March, so there’s plenty to see here. I just wish there was more bibliography available.