Presumably the document would be publically available, if it was inaccurate (it's not only going to be read by newbies), then it would be discredited and not linked to, except by search engines that would probably also pick up any critisism of that site/page.
Well, we all hope that trust metrics like that come into play and guard against people stumbling on bad advice!
But, the problem is that sometimes even supposedly "respectable" sites contain astoundingly bad advice. I remember seeing a FAQ for some piece of software (I think it was a video player) advising debian users having trouble compiling to make a symlink from /usr/include/linux to /usr/src/linux/include or similar. The correct answer is to install the kernel-headers package for your kernel. Nevertheless, that FAQ had gone unchallenged for over a year, probably resulting in several broken debian boxes...
That's source, not metadata.
Ok, so what is metadata in this case?
Probably the information contained in the README and INSTALL files... what it needs to compile, what it needs to run, what makes it nicer to use, etc. Look at Debian's package control files: not perfect, but quite a lot better than most others available now.
MJR