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Nitpicking Wikipedia's Vulnerabilities
tiltowait writes "A lot of Wikipedia critics point to hypothetical situations when giving reasons for not valuing the site. Wikipedia even has a 'Replies to common objections' article set up to field these. I'd rather look at some real examples of applying the same level of scrutiny to materials often held up as the Platonic ideal of 'scholarship,' such as peer-reviewed journals, conference papers, established journalism sources, monographs, and print encyclopedias. Even these have disclaimers because they can be can be vandalized or have their reliability and accuracy questioned. As dangerous as it is to trust unverified information, it can be just as bad to make prior judgments discounting information because the source happens to be anonymous. The above examples illustrate that all materials existing along a continuum of valuable information formats. Wikipedia articles can be useful for quickly obtaining factual overviews or as a starting point to further research. But that's just one librarian's opinion. How do tech-savvy people view Wikipedia?"
The problem that I have had with Wikipedia is that in editing articles on which I am a recognized expert, I have had my edits and entries entirely removed by others who "feel" that these edits were somehow inappropriate, even when I referenced those entries along with results from peer reviewed journals. So, while allowing everybody to edit, there is no weighting system in place for those individuals who may, in fact, know more about a particular subject matter than others who exert their biased or uneducated editorial control.
Now, all of that said, I do really appreciate Wikipedia as like the poster stated is a good starting out point for research into a particular topic.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
With firefox.
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
I'm probably in the minority, being a librarian a with a good opinion of Wikipedia. Many (mostly older) librarians, for example, relish their roles as gatekeepers to information. I suppose it comes from the old warden-style approach to protecting books, or some sort of warped view of taking "information is power" as a need to hoard and protect its distribution.
There is this sometimes misguided need to teach "information literacy," with exaggerated assumptions about "kids believing everything they read online." Recent library conferences have covered this alongside how students learn and use technology -- often with the same sort of bemused condescension that 19th century anthropologists exhibited toward alien cultures. It's unnerving. But teaching others to evaluate information themselves, rather than thinking it's our job to do it for them, is on the right track. History as shown a path towards direct and open access to information, and I see wiki publishing as a direct extension of this trend.
Librarians, in general, seem stuck on the "omg you can vandalize Wikipedia so it's worthless" argument. Jimbo even got asked, at the last ALA conference, essentially, "What's to stop me from distrupting information in Wikipedia?," by a librarian. And this is the profession so disturbed by book bannings? I just don't see libraries staying relevant if we don't acknowledge the value of blogs, wikis, and other new information formats (and we're not quite there yet).
Of course, those story links are nitpicks themselves. Library stuff (if it exists on your topic) is of better quality than what you'll find via Google. As for Wikipedia, content zealots -- both snobs and censors -- threaten the open encyclopedia's mission at least as much as the cranks. But there's no need to exaggerate the problems of Wikipedia. Sure, it can get messy, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
As another frontiersman was warned, "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."
So anyway, all of these comments are a bit of a hyperbolism. As a piece on peak libraries I started shows (oh yeah, that's a library science Wiki btw), I'm something of a provocateur at times. It's just that, after spending my early career trying to educate everyone that librarians are "with it", I've discovered that there's just as much of a need to convince librarians to get with the times.
For me the best thing about wikipedia is the concept behind it. A collaboration of people, working to increase the sum of human knowledge, because the sum of accumulated knowledge is something that is greater than its parts. Everyone working together to maintain this knowledge for the betterment of all. Is that an idealistic view? Of course. But what's wrong with idealism and striving for it? Wikipedia is more that just an encyclopedia -- though it's very good at that. It's a hope that we actually can all work together on something -- something that embiggens us all.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I view it as a great way to waste time at work, mostly.
-Sub
I just had a similar discussion with my girlfriend this past weekend. She found some valuable information on Wikipedia for a paper she’s writing on Chinese culture. I told her she should use that as a springboard: that Wikipedia could provide her the facts and details she needs, and that she should then find independent citable sources for each individual facts. I told her that I was sure it couldn’t be cited because the information there is simply too fluid and couldn’t be counted on to remain unchanged over time. She checked with her professor who wasn’t terribly familiar with the details, but had at least heard of it. He looked into the matter and told her that it was perfectly acceptable as long as the citations were up to MLA standards. I told her that her professor would turn out to be wrong in the long run (yeah, modesty is part of my charm, why do you ask?).
So I guess I agree with the story submittor (askor?) that Wikipedia rocks, but that their model simply doesn’t lend itself the the level of credibility needed for that sort of use. It’s great, and in many ways a more valuable resource than Google, and one hell of a social experiment. But at the end of the day, you simply don’t know if any given fact was contributed by a Princeton research librarian or Karl Rove.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
CmdrTaco: Wiki is silly. Not scalalble.
hemos: Wiki's make me want to guage my eyes out. gouge, even.
CmdrTaco: They're fun for small groups.
hemos: No, I like the idea.
CmdrTaco: Slashdot is for millions.
hemos: And yeah, for smaller groups is great. But we spent the 3 years scaling up to this level of users
CmdrTaco: Thats the thing that people don't understand-
hemos: and I'd hate to do the same thing over again with a different technology.
CmdrTaco: the rules are different when you have 5,000 users vs 350,000 each day. What works @5,000 is ludicrous at 350,000. You don't lock your doors in a town with a population of 5,000... but at a quartermilllion people, thats just stupid
So there you have it, from the same horses mouth that told us that the iPod is lame.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I use Wikipedia quite often, but I usually perform some secondary research.
Click here or here.
As dangerous as it is to trust unverified information, it can be even more dangerous to trust information which has been "verified" by "experts" (especially if it's information from your 1966 set of EB's)
Sure, Wikipedia probably contains more errors than EB, but it also contains many more articles. It would be interesting to know how these ratios compare.
I view it as an excellent starting place to get some information. If I have a basic question, it'll probably be answered by the Wikipedia article. If it's a more advanced question, the article should point me to more in-depth references.
So remember, if you're adding information, try to cite a source!
When I look something up in Wikipedia, I generally approach it with the assumption that I'm going to get a short, moderately informative, and probably at least somewhat mistaken article. Instead, I almost always find a well-researched and in-depth piece on whatever trivia I was looking up. It's not perfect, but I generally learn a great deal.
Yeah, I know I should stop assuming that I'm not going to get much, but I have that assumption with everything I look up online. It's just that Wikipedia gives me more pleasant surprises than most other sources.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
So that's basically it, there is a spectrum of categories from where Wikipedia works well and has reliable information (mathematics, history and technology categories) to where it is just edit wars that get worse and worse (society and history categories). Wikipedia is fairly reliable about what ideas Godel had about mathematics, Wikipedia is completely unreliable if you are interested in reading about say France's Front National or Vietnam's National Liberation Front. Wikipedia has not gotten better over the years in this regard, it has gotten worse. There are left wing wiki encyclopedias like Demopedia, Dkosopedia and Anarchopedia, and right-leaning ones like Wikinfo, and I predict over the coming years these alternative wikis will become quite large.
One recent example I can give, one guy just popped up who is accusing virtually every left-wing or liberal person in the 1950's was a Soviet spy, and by virtually everyone I mean editing hundreds of biographies and inserting that they were spies. Doing this is fine if done in the right way, but he is a bit nutty or stubborn or whatever and he has a dozen people reverting his stuff but that doesn't do much good. Then we have Lyndon Larouche followers come in as well. Or way out communists saying nutty things. Wikipedia would probably be better off if these people all went off to their own respective wikis.
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One of the things about Wikipedia is that it has become so large and vast in such a short time. Just three years ago Wikipedia only had around 50,000 articles. Last year it only had 300,000. It has grown so fast that it is now the 35th most visited website acording to alexa, and searching for Wikipedia gives over 300 million results.
Wikipedia has literally appeared out of nowhere in the context of the Internet and printed encyclopedias. It is already the most popular online reference work in terms of linkage and hits per month.
Its the fact that Wikipedia is so big, yet still relavtivley new that many people are skeptical of it, but I have been with Wikipedia for a long time and have appreciated its value, by around 2010 Wikipedia will have millions of articles, and people will have gotten used to its power. Anti vandal techniques are being developed, there is a dedicated vandal fighter program and there is now almost 600 administrators patrolling it.
Wikipedia is a monster, and it is carving out the internet. The World wide web will soon split into two webs, the Wiki web, and the Loki web.
A few days back there was talk about the Moller Sky Car, and someone said that the Newtonian and Bernoulli theories are incompatible, citing a Wikipedia article. (I'd link it, but I have a freakin migraine and really need to get to bed...)
Well, the wikipedia article was BS. Pulling out a real text like "Fundamentals of Aerodynamics" by Anderson would confirm that the Newtonian and Bernoulli views are compatible, just two different ways of expressing the same phenomenon. But since anyone who thinks s/he knows something about something can edit a wikipedia entry we get entries like that, which spread falsehoods.
I personally avoid Wikipedia for that very reason.
I suggest to people that when they are interested in a phenomenon that they try to find a reputable website that focuses on **just** that phenomenon. For example, if you have a question in aerodynamics, look for an aero website. Et Cetera.
-everphilski-
Notice that they don't say that the liberal bias has disappeared. In fact, it has become rather distinctly entrenched at the administrator level.
Notice how Accuracy in Media is called a conservative organization (which it is) time and time again, but the analagous organization on thee left is described thusly: "Media Matters monitors for and refutes identified and materially substantiated conservative misinformation found in media news reports, public affairs and talk radio shows from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and others."
So, in short your bias is "identified and materially substantiated misinformation," my bias is truth.
You can find about a hudnred other examples, for example the breaking up of the article on Communism into theory and practice to avoid having to mention any of that nasty genocide in the main article.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia. It's a community. Don't confuse the two.
Your contributions were probably questioned for two reasons. First, because Wikipedia is governed by a policy called NPOV, or Neutral Point Of View, which is interpreted to mean that an encyclopedia must reflect all perspectives on any subject. There can be no "absolute right" or "absolute wrong." According to NPOV, your opinion just that. Expertise does not exist. All sides must be represented, no matter how loony.
Second, you probably weren't taken seriously because you didn't contribute hundreds of edits over the course of a week. Wikipedia is dominated, literally, by those users who spend the most time editing. This, ultimately, is Wikipedia's greatest flaw: Its users are more interested in participating in a community than in building an encyclopedia. They call themselves "Wikipedians," and they stage meet-ups. Their reasons for participating are primarily social.
The result is a project governed by losers. Sorry, but it's the truth: The people with the most free time to dedicate to an online encyclopedia will always be the people least-qualified to contribute, because those who are qualified spend their time earning and practicing those qualifications in the real world. If the project were coordinated somehow, maybe shared between several universities with each department contributing according to its own specialization...maybe it could work. But Wikipedia is doomed to mediocrity, simply because it's populated by nutjobs with no social skills who drive away qualified contributors who threaten their pretend authority.
Knowledge is not democratic -- and expertise necessarily erodes equality. You cannot build a worthwhile encyclopedia based on the premise that everyone's contributions will be valuable.
Please don't read my journal
Yes, there are also well-written articles. And, despite the lack of fact-checking, there are relatively few glaring errors. But even the the good stuff/crap ratio is suprisingly high, there's still a lot of crap.
I'm one of those factoid geeks who read reference books for pleasure. (Do you know why a Major ranks a Lieutenant, but a Lieutenant-General ranks a Major-General? I do, God help me!) I'll never do that with Wikipedia, because I never know in advance whether the article I'm about to read will educate and inspire me or confuse and nauseate me. It's a reference I find useful, but unlike many other reference works, I can never really fall in love with.
I think Wikipedia's long-term value will be less in its ability to inform its readers than it's ability to educate its contributers. It's teaching them how hard it is to put together a useful reference work, which is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. Maybe someday there're be a Wikipedia 2.0 that harnesses all that effort but offers better crap filters.
(Dislaimer - I'm a wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and the "featured article director" -- I choose the featured articles you see on the main page every day)
/Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockh aus_and_Encarta
Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:
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1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content
PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf
2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled
Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/20 04-October/035339.html
3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm
4) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten) posted in his blog about a
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674
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As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.
Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Wikipedia is the top hit on google for a lot of common searches, and I do agree that it is an okay source of information if you need info in a hurry. However I have noticed a clear liberal bias among many articles. Here are three examples I remember off the top of my head from searches in the last week --
Little Saigon, CA -- the article gives a good overview of the landscape of Westminister and Garden Grove, but then out of nowhere he drops "The event also raised some controversial issues about constitutional free speech in the United States". No sir, the event didn't raise controversial issues. I suppose if you were a socialist then yes, maybe the issues would be controversial. But to 99.99% of America, someone flying the VC flag on American soil is a disgrace to those who gave their lives in Vietnam. The guy broke the law by selling pirated movies and he was arrested, end of story.
Newt Gingrich -- In the TRIVIA section: "Candace Gingrich, his sister, works for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest gay and lesbian organization. In years past she has headed up HRC's "National Coming Out Day" campaign." Gee, thanks for that "trivia". The author couldn't reasonably fit that line in an article on Newt himself, so he sneaks it into the "trivia" section. Clear liberal bias here.
Ronald Reagan -- "It is frequently reported that Secret Service agents had to inform Reagan every morning that he was once the president". Really sir, since it's so "frequently" reported I guess you wouldn't mind providing a link? What business does this phrase have in an encyclopedia entry of Ronald Reagan other than to undermine his legacy??
I teach freshman composition at the U of Texas in Austin. My students are about to begin their second paper, which will involve a substantial research component, and Wikipedia was one of the first things I covered in discussing acceptable sources. I do not accept citations of Wikipedia articles, for two reasons:
1) The articles are not stable. They change on a regular basis. If my students cite something, I need it to be static so that I can verify their citations easily. I am well aware that Wikipedia has a robust versioning system, but that is irrelevant to my purposes. If a student cites something and I cannot immediately locate it, I simply do not have the time to sort through the recent edits to find a version of the article that matches what my student quoted. This is particularly true of popular and frequently updated articles, where there can be dozens of recent edits to sort through. There just aren't enough hours in the day for that.
2) The sources are all too frequently anonymous. Some Wikipedia articles contain excellently documented source information, it is true; but many others do not. There is no reliable way to separate solid, documentable information from personal crank theories. Sometimes they're obvious; sometimes they're not. Some will invoke the magic of "many eyeballs make shallow bugs" at this point, pointing out that errors tend to get corrected or reverted fairly rapidly. But once again, that is irrelevant. If my student cites an unfixed "bug" to support an argument, that's just as damaging to the student's paper as it would be if the bug never got fixed.
So what I tell my students is this: Wikipedia is great for fast, informal definitions of unfamiliar material, but not for formal papers submitted for credit. You can use it as a starting point for further research -- I have used it as such a starting point myself. But every piece of information from the Wikipedia article needs to be verified against a static, identifiable source before it can be used in a paper, and then you need to cite the verifying source rather than Wikipedia.
If it makes the Wikipedia people feel better, I also refuse to accept citations of the Encyclopedia Britannica -- or any encyclopedia, for that matter. Encyclopedias provide useful overviews; but I want my students to grapple with primary sources, not secondary summaries.
Do I take everything I read there seriously? No, no more (or less) so than I take what The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times has to say. After all their authors are anonymous to me, and I frequently diagree with their facts or intrepretations.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
That's nowhere nearly as bad as the 20 year old college student who vastly overestimates his understanding of a topic, and the value of what he has to contribute.
It's easy to notice the handiwork of the twelve-year old and revert it, and there's countless people who can do it. There's relatively few people who can understand why the 20-year old's contribution is very wrong; it takes them considerable effort to demonstrate the guy's errors to a layperson audience; and they're very much outnumbered by the 20 year olds.
And nothing is worse than a mob of said 20 year olds, independently making small edits to a coherent, cohesive article in order to make small, local "improvements" (without any concern for the overall organization and narrative flow of the article), and thereby rendering the article into an unreadable random shopping list of distorted half-truths.
Are you adequate?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've always had the same hesitating suggestion: branch the wikipedia so that there's something like a "stable branch".
Of course, such a thing would be a logistical nightmare, and it's damn near impossible. However, I think it would be appreciated by a lot of people if some editorial process could be worked in somehow.
This is actually a very good idea.
A stub could start out as a beta, where it gets many edits. After a certain ammount of time/edits the entry could be forked into a RC and dev page. The RC could be locked and the dev maintained on a seperate tab (like the discussion or talk links are now). You could then put up a voting system where you can give a thumbs up or down.
If it gets a number of yes votes it could then be called a stable page (1.0) More edits would still be made on the dev page until it reaches the limit where it goes up for a up/down vote again, and a snapshot of the dev would go up for review. If it passes you could then have a 1.1 version of the page and continue adnausium.
This would provide a signifigant ammount of quality control on the page.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
"Who cares if it's easy to deface, it's got great moderation!"
Swift (and not so swift) moderation doesn't do very much good. A friend added me to a list of famous erotic authors. It was removed.. a few weeks later. Get what? I (Aaron Gyes) am still, months later, all over the damn internet.
http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-authors-of-er otic-works i /list_of_authors_of_erotic_works.htm o f%20authors%20of%20erotic%20works c _authors u thors c _authors f _erotic_works t ic_authors / List_of_authors_of_erotic_works.html / s _of_erotic_works L ist_of_erotic_authors s t_of_erotic_authors . html d .aspx?w=List_of_erotic_authors o f_erotic_works c _authors
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/l/l
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/List%20
http://www.biologydaily.com/biology/List_of_eroti
http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/List_of_erotic_a
http://web.linix.ca/pedia/index.php/List_of_eroti
http://www.europe.com/index.php/List_of_authors_o
http://www.medicalrace.com/dictionary/List_of_ero
http://www.dictionaryofeverything.com/explore/112
http://list-of-authors-of-erotic-works.iqnaut.net
http://www.omnipelagos.com/entry?n=list_of_author
http://www.gardeningdaily.com/flowers-and-plants/
http://www.braindex.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Li
http://en.efactory.pl/List_of_erotic_authors
http://www.art-fresh.net/DisplayArticleFull314102
http://www.thefreeencyclopedia.com/definition/wor
http://bigpedia.com/encyclopedia/List_of_authors_
http://www.dogluvers.com/dog_breeds/List_of_eroti
Note:
Whatever answer you get, you should immediately do some poll elsewhere to find out if you can trust it. A lot of Slashdot critics(*) have pointed to hypothetical situations where comments might not actually be tech-savvy!
(*)"It should be noted that polls on Slashdot, like most on the Internet, are notoriously unreliable."
This is...
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The only thing is, who certifies?
It's only top-down designers who face this perennial conundrum, you know. If you free yourself from the narrow confines of socialist thinking this problem is easy to solve: let a free market assign the appropriate value of Wikipedia information, just as it successfully assigns the appropriate value of bazillions of commodities from 1/8" copper tubing to expertise in brain surgery.
How could that work? Simple, if Wikipedia could figure out a way to let users bid to pay for information, and let experts (or random wannabes) bid to sell information, and connect them up. The ol' invisible hand would rapidly solve the problem of assigning an appropriate value to every article and every author in the Wikipedia.
Users for whom information is mission-critical, e.g. who will be testing the truth of that information most severely, would end up offering the highest price for it. So, information that consistently proves reliable and accurate in actual use (and not just in some academical opinion) would fetch the highest price. Similarly, experts who really are expert, who can easily provide the high quality information, are going to end up commanding the highest fees, fees which will encourage them to provide more of those tasty nuggets. Lonely groupies who merely browse and argue without actually using the information in the real world won't be paying high prices, so they will have little effect on the nature of the supply. Flamers who supply plausible-sounding but useless or misleading garbage will quickly find the price of their product falling to peanuts.
In other words, I think the essential flaw in Wikipedia is that it is free, because in the real world things that are free usually end up being worth the price (i.e. nothing), because there is, indeed, as you point out, no clearly reliable way to ensure that noise and froth do not swamp what's actually valuable.
That being said, it's hard to know how Wikipedia could change this. Aside from its philosophical blinders, which probably prevent it from understanding the nature of its dilemma and the solution, it is difficult to make appropriate micropayments. No Wikipedia article is worth, say, $2 for a look, or $50/year for a subscription. But would I pay a nickel for a look, if I could pay instantly with just a single mouse click? I might indeed. Especially if I knew that the price was set by market demand from people who had to put up their own money to get the information, which goes far to guarantee that the information has proven worth the price when actually used.
...but the feedback loop from customer to producer is poor. Google doesn't allow the Researcher fee structure to be set by the market. They have this simple system where Researchers just get canned if they get too many poor reviews. That's very crude. For one thing, a good market needs crappy vendors who sell their wares cheaply, because sometimes a crappy answer is Good Enough -- sometimes you want to rent a limo to impress your date, but sometimes you want to rent a wreck to move your crap from one apartment to another.
/. denizens posting from Mom's basement? Hmmm.
Also, the price you set for your question probably only affects the speed of the answer. To make it affect the quality of your answer -- which is probably a lot more important! -- Google should provide some way for you to "hire" a Researcher with a quality you prefer (e.g. a degree in the field), or at least a Researcher with a better Google Answer track record.
Actually, the best system is clearly just an auction. You post a question, and Researchers bid on the right to answer it, with stated deadlines for doing so. You accept whatever bid you like, or none of them, pay your money, get your answer. Depending on how you like it, you attach a positive or negative comment to the Researcher's growing "reputation" file. A Researcher with a large and glowing reputation can, of course, post far higher bids for his services than a newbie or person with a mixed reputation.
A fascinating social experiment would emerge if Google kept everything about the Researchers except their Google-Answer-earned reputation secret: would the "conventional" measures of authority be reflected in the actual fees commanded by Researchers, after a while? For example, would people with PhDs from top schools actually end up with market-set fees that are a lot higher than the fees the market sets for lowly college students or
A large system like this, supported by micropayment, would also revolutionize how many of us work. Suppose I'm very good at programming in general, but the absolute world's expert on some tiny corner of it, say certain types of machine vision algorithms. Now, I can't really make a living consulting on the tiny sliver where I'm absolutely top, because people rarely need that level of expertise in this narrow field, and they don't need it for long. So I have to make a living using my broader, less high talents, and be paid accordingly less.
But...what if I can collect micropayments for answering questions on my narrow topic of superb expertise from all over the world? Among a pool of 2 billion workers, there might very well be enough questions in my micro-discipline to support me. Which means two interesting things: first, I have a better average pay rate, because I am being hired mostly for that in which I am the world's top expert rather than for that in which I am only pretty knowledgeable. Secondly, people have a better chance of getting very good answers to their questions, because they have the chance to hire the world's top expert for 10 minutes instead of hiring someone merely pretty knowledgeable for two months.
In fact, ever had a question which you just know an expert could answer instantly, but on which you also just know you'll beat your head for four weeks? I sure have. What a great deal it would be if you could hire the expert for 60 seconds! I'd gladly pay $50 for 60 seconds of certain expert's time from time to time. It's a good deal for me -- I save weeks of my own time -- and it's a good deal for the expert -- at $50/minute he's earning money awfully fast. If there's a way to collect and process zillions of $50 microtransactions from all over the world...