There's all kinds of career advice out there on the Internet, much of it conflicting or wrong. The conflicting or wrong advice is especially prevalent (but not limited to) that found on open-access Q&A sites.
I think it would be a shame if this site were to be another source of unhelpful career advice from the masses. In the early hours of this site, I've seen quite a few answers that seemed clearly to come from the gut, with no source or experience cited to back them up.
Would it make sense to have a "Back it up"-style rule in the FAQ (and actively enforced), to try to maintain a high signal/noise ratio? Or should we just trust general SE voting behavior to push the cream to the top and the dregs down?
Example "Back it up" policy from Parenting.SE's FAQ:
Please note that opinions shared here should be backed up either with a reference, or experiences that happened to you personally. Also, posts that primarily exist to push a specific agenda (propaganda), and soap-boxing, are not welcome.
Some people seem to think that this sort of rule would be an appeal for anecdotes. I propose, therefore, the following simplification of the rule which makes no such appeal:
It is never sufficient to simply say what you think the answer is. You must always include in your answer information about why you think your answer is correct.
The point of such a rule is to give the voting community some information about the source of the information on which to base their votes. Under this rule, the answer could include (in roughly descending order of how they should generally be evaluated by the community) a citation, a description of the answerer's experience with this sort of problem, a line of reasoning, or simply an honest statement that "this comes straight from my gut."