I am not optimistic that they will reach the point of being a reference. I fear that, especially for product-specific information, it will eventually become too hard to separate up-to-date content from outdated content.

I do not know a good way to prevent that, other than through manual intervention (hm, thinking of it, machine learning could help here. One could train a model that knows, for example, that 'perl' answers from five years ago are more up-to-date than 'rails' ones from two years ago)