Yahoo! Answers, A Librarian's Worst Nightmare 252
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."
Why does it need to be? (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple Mathematics (Score:2, Interesting)
As a matter of fact, I put this philosophy to practice because I've been inside a library for research exactly once in the last five years.
Stupid question deserves a stupid answer (Score:4, Interesting)
The contrast with Google Answers is remarkable (Score:2, Interesting)
For a brief period of time, I answered a few questions on Yahoo! Answers with answers that were correct, comprehensive, and included sources for its claims. Yet I found that often, the person asking the question or other readers would choose or vote another person's comically poor answer as the "Best Answer" instead.
Google had a similar service named Google Answers that Google shut down a few years ago:
http://answers.google.com/ [google.com]
All the people answering questions ("researchers") were screened and approved by Google. Google Answers required the person asking the question to pay a fee (usually a small one), most of which went to the researcher answering the question.
The quality of both questions and especially answers tended to be quite good. The contrast between Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers is quite remarkable. It is a shame Google decided to shut down Google Answers. (You can still questions asked before the shut down, but cannot ask new questions.)
Best to learn by experience? (Score:5, Interesting)
Suppose you're a teacher or librarian....
The more skeptical the students are, and the more they learn to think on their own, the better --- a truly great teacher will also encourage students to be skeptical of his lectures.
I had a university professor who would intentionally make two subtle errors in derivations during Physics lectures that would cancel each other out, resulting in the correct solution at the end of the derivation.
He'd mention in the next lecture that there were two such "mistakes" in the previous day's lecture, and would then assign a problem set that explicitly depended upon those two mistakes not being there. At the time, we hated him for it, but it was an absolutely fantastic way of making us learn the material through and through, and taught us to think on our own, rather than rote transcription of whatever was written on the board.
And teach them to do so (Score:3, Interesting)
This "problem" of too much information is only going to get worse, lets start teaching kids how to deal with it.
Library Reference is Dying (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Best to learn by experience? (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the brilliant things about this (which I didn't find out until just last year) was that the diagrams on how to build things would deliberately hide steps. For example, in-between step two and step four something would be added on the back half that wasn't shown. You, the child trying to build the toy, had to figure out what was missing on your own to get the thing finished. At the time, I remember noticing it, but attributing it to sloppiness; it took some effort and thought, but I always figured out what was missing. So you couldn't just build things by following the steps shown. You had to know what you were doing.
This helped me much later in life when buying furniture from Ikea.
Now that my son's turned 3, Dad's sending me the starter set to give to him for Christmas... he kept every last piece of it, all these years.
Re:Get your answers here! (Score:4, Interesting)
At least that's better than the crap standard always trotted out - the "Encyclopedia Britannica:.
"been a heated debate over whether Wikipedia is as trustworthy as Encyclopedia Britannica"
Go and grab an older copy, and see all the crap that was in there as "science" - a lot of it with a racist bent, or advocating social darwinism. The newer editions aren't any better, in that errors continue to be propounded.
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). The editors of Britannica, not knowing how to read a calendar, or being unfamiliar with April Fools (they could look it up :-) and with a total lack of awareness, republished it as fact for years and years, even though it was easy enough to disprove if they had done ANY secondary checking of facts. The book cited in the article didn't exist, though several others, all "full of crap" satirizations, did ...
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.
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
That's absolutely the truth. A while back I happened to be searching for the answer to a riddle that was circulating about what turns a polar bear's fur white, makes men cry, and several other things...all of it written almost like a poem. The problem was the the answer was written as a poem and despite the fact that it was obvious that someone not only thought about the answer but wrote it down as a poem in response to the same rhythm of the riddle, everyone instead focused on a technicality in the riddle "Can you guess the riddle?" instead of "can you guess the answer?" and so the answer accepted by yahoo and all the idiots there was "No"..despite the fact that it could also be answered "Yes"(because it *also* doesn't ask if you can correctly guess if you play on their technicality).
THIS is why I use Google as my search engine and not Yahoo.
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the pages that popped up was on Yahoo Answers. It was from someone asking if Vista supported multiple languages. The answer (chosen by the asker as the 'best' response, I might add) was along the lines of "no, it's impossible. You have to buy a separate copy of Vista for each language you want". I think that just about summed up the service for me.