Why is this website up?

Answer 1

To help people receive answers to questions they want to know the answers to, who may not be very confident about using the internet on a wider basis.

Many people are not very computer literate- they don't know how to 'surf' the internet to find the answers to the questions they need to know. Thus if they at least know how to get on to WikiAnswers, that is a help to them. In addition to that, many users of WikiAnswers have additional information on the subject in question, that is not ( or CAN not) be provided on the wider internet. This service is used by a wide variety of people, who include scholars- students, University lecturers and professors, academics, and specialists in many given fields, who can give extra information on a subject that may be omitted from Wikipedia or other websites. You can often find out more from a reply on WikiAnswers than you can from other sites, simply because the answerer may well be more up to date and knowledgable on a given subject than many people who contribute (or even write entirely) websites on the subject in question.

There are, of course, some idiots who abuse the service and put stupid replies to serious questions, but you just have to ignore these and use your own common sense to interpret the right answer.