I was browsing old questions and answers and bumped into an odd scenario: Can “paper bag” mean any bag?. An excerpt from the accepted answer:
Almost all on-line dictionaries define paper bag as:
A bag made of paper or plastic for holding customer's purchases
I did some quick research and added a comment voicing my opinion that the online dictionaries were in error. The actual question for meta is this: How trustworthy is WordNet?
WordNet's definition for paper bag appears to have been copied onto dictionary.reference.com and thefreedictionary.com. Both of those sites credit WordNet; WordNet credits itself.
Doing other searches (such as "bag" or "paper") reveal WordNet as merely a part of a larger body of sources for those two sites. It appears that WordNet is just being picked up as one of the many sourceable dictionaries available to compilation sites. For comparison, Merriam-Webster choked on the query for "paper bag". Google's define:paper bag
pointed back to WordNet.
Until today I had been blindly trusting the internet's dictionaries. It appears that there may be a few caveats. Namely, I need to start checking where the definitions are actually coming from. The first step in this, for me, is asking about WordNet. Does anyone else have any opinions or experiences with WordNet, good or bad?