Slate takes Yahoo! Answers to Town
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
I used to love Slate, until they started having videos on their home page start on auto-play, but a recent reddit link let me to this funny article, titled “A Librarian’s Worst NightmareYahoo! Answers, where 120 million users can be wrong.”
Here’s a quote (emphasis added):
“While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It’s every middle-school teacher’s worst nightmare about the Web.”
That’s all true, but man it’s so addictive to try and get your score up. When I was playing with it, I figured out how to get awarded the ‘right’ answer most of the time. You search for questions that are about to expire that have no answers, and then come up with a half way decent answer, and BOOYA: 10 points awarded. Not very good for ‘authority’ or ‘accuracy’, but hey, it’s fun! 