Yahoo! Answers, A Librarian's Worst Nightmare

Slate has an interesting look at the realm of online question and answer forums. Yahoo! Answers is boasting over 120 million users and 400 million answers placing it just behind Wikipedia for most visited education/reference site on the internet. While this may be a great insight into crowd mentality and search preferences, it seems to be a "complete disaster as a traditional reference tool." "For educators fretting that the Internet is creating a generation of 'intellectual sluggards,' the problem isn't just that Yahoo!'s site helps ninth-graders cheat on their homework. It's that a lot of the time, it doesn't help them cheat all that well. [...] Like Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia isn't perfect. But for savvy browsers who know how to use it, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of factual information. In the last two years, there's been a heated debate over whether Wikipedia is as trustworthy as Encyclopedia Britannica. This obscures a crucial point: Wikipedia is at least reliable enough that such a question can be asked. Take my word for it--no one is going to make any such claims about Yahoo! Answers any time soon."

Re:Comparing Apples and... What??

[mustpax]

To quote Maeby from Arrested Development: "that's like comparing apples and a fruit no one's ever heard of."

so what?

[circletimessquare]

we don't want to regulate videogames, slashdot agrees: this is a nanny state

we don't want to regulate online dating, slashdot agrees: this is a nanny state

likewise:
we don't want regulate wikipedia or yahoo answers: THIS IS A NANNY STATE

people ask random friends advise all the time. lots of it is pointless or toxic or ignorant. people need to use their minds to filter the good from the bad. we need to learn to trust people to make decisions themselves

end of non-story

So where is the problem?

[Vampyre_Dark]

If Yahoo answers doesn't let them cheat all that well, than why is there a problem? The student who did the proper research still gets a passing grade, and the student who tried to 'cheat' did suffers for it.

How is this any different than 20 years ago?

Re:Huh?

[TubeSteak]

Nothing apparently...
http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2179393 [slate.com]
TFA doesn't even use the word librarian once.
Just trolling for page hits I assume.

Approach

[decipher_saint]

Ok, like many of you when I was in school researching something I'd wander over to the card catalogue and find several books from different authors / publishers, absorb the relevant data from them and draw conclusions on correlated data that was supported by most of my references. How did I know the data in those books was correct? Often, they cited the same piece of work or research (usually unavailable to my library), so in a lot of cases even though I had different perspectives on a given topic I couldn't be 100% sure that the information presented there was correct, all I really had with my bibliography was the unspoken assurance that several publishers and authors weren't trying to trick me into believing something.

Now-a-days Google is my card catalogue, Wikis and Answer sites are my reference material. I hold information I cull from the internet with the same amount of trust as the books I used to use. I'm not sure if I first heard it in high school or not but the same rule applies to both:

Check your references before you even begin to draw conclusions.

blame the 'tools' not the tools

[tzhuge]

All these types of stories make it as if there weren't unreliable sources prior to the current digital information age. Whatever happened to teaching students about how to use sources?

Re:Good Enough for College

[SixFactor]

I'd like to know what college you attend, as well as your major, so I can steer my kids away from said institution/field of study.

Thanks!

Re:So where is the problem?

[pimpimpim]

I agree with this! I was a tutor several years ago and had to check lab reports. The experiments they did have been done for the last 20 years and copies are widely available. It's still difficult to see who copied (although that university uses an electronic plagiarism database for almost everything by now, that compares with locally known work but also the internet), especially if it could have been two groups working together. Should I actually mind if two groups work together if it leads to a nice job?

What was easy to see, however, were people who just had it plain wrong. And there were several cases where two identical, crappy, reports were given to me. These people ended up having to do a lot of more work in the end! Idiots! The process of learning itself is actually copying stuff from others, but in the process getting to understand the difference between good stuff and bad stuff by comparing to what you already know and makes sense. If you are too lazy to do the last part, you won't come far even if you copy from the most reliable resource.

Many scientists use wikipedia for example, there are derivations of exotic formulae out there you will hardly find anywhere else. But they will make pretty sure the statements there are double-checked (working the calculations you find out by yourself is the best way here).

Can I just point out

[Colin Smith]

That the answers in Yahoo Answers were mostly created by hormonal twelve year olds and as such are complete utter bollocks.

Get this. The person choosing the "best" answer is the same person who doesn't have a fucking clue and had to ask the question in the first place. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but I think they should get a medal for "The most ironic contribution to world knowledge".
 

Yes and no, sorta

[Moraelin]

Well, yes and no, sorta.

If used as you describe, true, it's _sometimes_ better than nothing.

Then again, sometimes worse than nothing. An incomplete, distorted understanding of something may actually compound the problem, instead of making it any better. E.g., an incomplete, distorted mis-understanding of each other is largely why we have a perpetual conflict in the Middle East, or Islamist nuts blowing themselves up. E.g., an equally unqualified monkey reinforcing an already wrong idea, might just give people enough confidence to do something very stupid, instead of staying at the stage of wondering about it. Etc.

Seriously, we already have people taking their knowledge from movies, urban legends, PR, whatever. You can read about some of them, for example, on the various "dumbest criminals" lists. A site looking like a more reputable way to get a quick and supposedly informed answer, might just fool more people.

The second problem is that more and more schoolkids and students are using those as a substitute for learning or thinking for themselves. Now this isn't necessarily a fault of the site itself. And if it worked for anyone, I'd blame the school first. Nevertheless, it might bite us all in the arse later. Hard.

Re:Approach

[tilandal]

That is of course total bull. For a book to show up at your library several things had to occur. #1) The author must have taken the time (ie money) to write the book. #2) The editor must have gone through the book. #3) A publisher must have thought that the book had enough merit to print. #4) A librarian must have thought that the book had enough merit to buy. By the time the book got into your hands it has been vetted at least 3 times. Maybe it has not been throughly researched but you can be assured that at least someone thinks that the book is worthwhile. A book in your local library has just a smidge more credibility then a random guy on a message board.

Re:So where is the problem?

[ResidntGeek]

If Yahoo answers doesn't let them cheat all that well, than why is there a problem?

Because the students are learning things which are incorrect. They're going through life not only ignorant, but actually misinformed.

The student who did the proper research still gets a passing grade, and the student who tried to 'cheat' did suffers for it.

This will sound like heresy to many, but there *are* things in life which matter more than grades. Things like level of knowledge and understanding, which aren't really reflected by grades.

Re:No

[arth1]

I remember when we used to say that about AOL...

Newbie. Many of us remember well the times before AOL and MSN dumped their user mass onto Internet.
When they were proprietary BBS networks, everthing was well in the world. Spam was almost non-existent, you didn't have to explain everything to the users, who were clever enough to figure out that inability to ping vax.ox.ac.uk didn't mean you had to reinstall your OS or call a guy in Bangalore to help you. The lion was grazing with the sheep. Or at least devouring them quietly.

The problem Yahoo Answers faces is that you can have trust or you can have anonymity, but you can't have both. In a small professional circle, you can generally trust the answers, because there are enough peers who would jump your shit if you gave wrong answers. In an anonymous world-wide forum, you can't. There's no accountability, and the volume is too high for peers to review anything. Especially if you get paid to provide answers, but NOT paid to provide corrections to answers.

If Yahoo! wants to gain credibility for their QA section, they need to introduce paid overseers that cross-check answers (and each other) and with the authority to add red ink comments inside other people's answers, axe payments to those who give wrong answers, and give a Yahoo! paid bonus to those who give extremely good answers.
Let the users see how well Yahoo! professionals (and not other sheep^Wusers) rate them.
This can only be successful if anonymity is dropped, and someone can't just create a new blank account if eventually booted or rated down (like the trolls do here on slashdot).

Re:Huh?

[Lijemo]

No, it's a Patriot Act subpoena complete with gag order.

Re:Approach

[vimh42]

If I recall correctly, factual information had little to do with writing a research paper in highschool. What was important was writing a paper in the format requested, citing correctly and turning the paper in on time. Oh sure, I had a few teachers that might have checked my sources, but that was just to see if I used a variety of sources and not just one and made up extra citations to fill that requirement.

I suppose all those papers taught me was that the truth is irrelevant. It's all about presentation. I should have gone into politics.

Re:Good Enough for College

[rjh]

Yes. Being wrong, but documenting it clearly so that someone who comes after you can discover that you're wrong, is far better than being right, but documenting it so vaguely that the people who come after you cannot recreate the original chain of reasoning that led you to your conclusions.

I really don't care if you're right or wrong in a paper. I care about whether you can prove that you're right or wrong. The two are completely different. If you're wrong but you supply me with your evidence, your chains of reasoning, your sources, then your paper is worth much, much more than someone who is right but cannot document a thing.

Re:So where is the problem?

[DragonWriter]

The problem is not that Yahoo! Answers has false information.

The problem is that schools aren't teaching students how to evaluate sources. If they were, students would learn very quickly not to rely on Yahoo! Answers.

Re:Why does it need to be?

[Jugalator]

Their purpose is to be small, simple aid if you have nowhere better to look.

Yahoo Answers is hardly even that. If you've used it for a total of an hour, you'll probably see it's more like a community site for people interested in discussing various topics. A lot of questions there are rhetorical and can't even be answered... Others are asked not because the one asking wants an actual answer, yet others seem to do it as some weird way of trolling. And that's just about the people asking questions. Those answering them are often even worse.

Things like "Why is the sky blue?" Answers are like: "Because of reflections from the water" :-S

People often don't even know, or care to tell they don't know, they just guess and pretend like they do... Err... Why? They won't even win prizes, just fictional "points".

It's among the lamest forms of lameness I can imagine wasting time on. At least if I waste time here on Slashdot on discussing topics, I may feel I'm actually helping someone.

Re:Get your answers here!

[tjstork]

Case in point - back in the '70s, a joke article about "Thomas Crapper, inventor of the flush toilet" appeared in the April edition of Scientific American (iirc, it was in one of Martin Gardner's columns).

Thomas Crapper craps up Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Fuck Britanicca. Overpriced, high-pressure sales tactics ("buy the encyclopedia and it'll help your kids in school" ... yeah, right), built-in obsolescence, and a VERY slow update/corrections policy. By one estimate, 10% of all articles are off.

I think Britanica is awesome. Sure, Wikipedia can be useful, but at some point, the bad writing just drives me nuts. In, Britannica the articles are generally well written. Paid, professional editors work wonders, and the lack of them is telling in Wikipedia.

Even the previously mentioned Crapper article, is well, crap. Two immediately horrible things jump out. First, a paragraph begins "Yet another purported explanation is that ". It's a choppy sentence that implies the tail end of an enumeration where none exists.

One librarian's view

[spastasmagoria]

The problem isn't with kids getting answers off the internet. I personally look at it as a shortcut, and as someone said, a place to start when I don't have a freakin' clue where to start looking. It can at least tell you whether the search term you're looking for is animal, vegetable or mineral. The problem: Kids are not taught how to check the veracity of their internet sources. While book sources are fallable, they at least go through a more thorough screening process (in most cases) than things on, say, Wikipedia or About.com. Kids also tend to think they're the best internet searchers in the world, when really they're the worst. They don't know how to narrow search terms, in addition to vetting their sources. If they type in a name, and a company name or sales website comes up first, they will assume that that site is the best site, because Google had it first in the search results. I don't believe the internet helps students cheat (except for in cases when they're copying and pasting/plagiarizing, or the purpose of the assignment is to learn how to use book resources). I don't believe in wasting students' time. If we allow them to learn things efficiently, then we'll have time for them to learn more things. Also, why reinvent the wheel, or spend time searching for information across a dozen books that someone has condensed into a convenient, time-saving article on the internet? Time management is something we need to teach our young as well! Teaching kids how to properly use the information on the internet is just part of information literacy. Of course, a lot of teachers and libraries are dropping the ball when it comes to this completely, or are just missing out on an important teaching opportunity. They either say "no internet sources" or just turn a blind eye to where the information is coming from. That is doing a disservice to young people that we are trying to teach critical thinking and problem solving skills to. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that things like Yahoo! Answers are not going away. We can either teach students how to use these tools properly, or we can continue to whine about the quality of the work they hand in. We're the instructors, we need to INSTRUCT them on the use of the resource. Otherwise we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Re:Yes and no, sorta

[AvitarX]

You're one of those people at restaurants that uses a PDA to calculate tis, aren't you?

I do simple math all the time, ad usually it would be a real PITA to grab a calculator. You probably simply undervalue the ability to do simple multiplication because you can do t simply and effectively. Though it is perhaps possible that you are special and were in a slow class, which is why it took so long. We did it in 12 weeks, with actual lessons involving critical thinking (basic word problems, dividing cheerios into equal groups and eating them, probably some analog clock stuff (I guess we should stop teaching that too though?). On Monday we would get something to take home and study, it would be every thing up to 12xN where N was that weeks number. On Wednesday we would review it, and Friday a test.

It was constantly re-enforced well throughout high-school and as an adult, by the humiliation in needing a calculator for basic math.