Joy refreshed the thread with these questions:

I guess what some of us are asking is who are the people who publish Snopes? Is it an organization? Is it a person? And why should we believe that every word is "gospel"? Signed...A skeptic

Snopes.com is operated by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson, and it's my understanding that they do most of the research work for the Website. There is an article about Snopes in the April 2009 issue of Reader's Digest (click). The name comes from the fictional Snopes family in the Snopes Trilogy of William Faulkner.
I find Snopes to be very useful, especially when I get e-mail chain letters and want to explain to friends why they shouldn't have sent the letter without verifying it first (especially with virus hoaxes and anti-Obama hate messages). However, there's something about Snopes that leaves me unsatisfied. I think Glueman is very accurate in this description:

literalist, true/false binary approach rather than an interpretive, on-going attitude: information as science

While many of the Urban Legends that Snopes deals with are true folklore, I don't really think that Snopes has a respect for folklore. All Snopes wants to know is whether the information is true or false. Snopes rarely considers whether the legend is a good story, or how that story came to be. Urban legends are rich materials for study and appreciation, and it seems a shame to simply dismiss them as factually false.
That being said, I pray every day for the death of the urban legend that insists that Barack Obama was born a Muslim in Kenya or Indonesia, and that his Hawaii birth certificate is a fabrication by a Muslim conspiracy that intends to conquer and destroy the United States.

-Joe-