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."

Comments

Why does it need to be?

[AuMatar]

I don't really use any of those Q&A type sites, but it seems to me that their purpose isn't to be a reference site. Their purpose is to be small, simple aid if you have nowhere better to look. As such, they seem to work and most of the time get you a decent answer, or at least a place to start. The fact is, for most questions in this world you don't need to do a great deal of research, you just want a quick close enough answer.

Simple Mathematics

[LaskoVortex]

Did any one do the math when they criticized on-line resources? It takes all of 3 ms to get thousands of possible answers to a question with an online search tool. Back in my undergrad days, if I needed to know something, it was 45 minutes before I could get to the library, get a stack of books and search the text myself. This type of inefficiency is mind-boggling these days. I'm almost 40 now, have all the requisite advanced degrees, and am pulling a damn good salary at one of the world's finest educational universities--so I think I am in a position to say with some authority what is intellectually lazy and what is not in terms of researching facts. So, let me declare unambiguously that using google, wikipedia, and yahoo makes good-old-fashion sense. (Kids: don't listen to the fogies--they are bitter about their wasted youth, etc.)

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

[DeadDecoy]

Maybe if students are cheating off of Yahoo and Wikipedia, teachers aren't asking students challenging questions. In essence, they are asking 'fill in the blank', 'short answer', or 'multiple choice' questions that are easy to snag off an encyclopedic site. Instead of complaining about how such sites produce intellectual laggards, maybe we should think of how they can be used to enhance some complex thought process and their practical limitations. For instance, a teacher could ask a student to solve some physics question specialized for the class that involves more than one algorithm to solve. That would make it harder to google if the student doesn't understand the problem and know where to look. If they understand it, find a ready made solution, and apply it, then they should get some credit (more so if they cite their source). It's not enough that we want children with critical thinking skills. It's also important to have teachers with critical think skills as well. Otherwise, it's kind of moot when the students are more resourceful than the teacher.

The contrast with Google Answers is remarkable

[AviN]

Yahoo! Answers is a remarkably bad place to obtain reliable information. There are exceptions, but the website consists mostly of people asking stupid questions and other people providing stupid answers.

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/

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?

[moosesocks]

Let me play devil's advocate here:

Suppose you're a teacher or librarian....

• Don't explicitly ban the use of Yahoo Answers or Wikipedia, but do make sure to ruthlessly demand that sources are cited.
  
• When they do use Yahoo or Wikipedia, and come up with a blatantly incorrect bit, or don't cite any other sources whatsoever, come down hard, and fail their sorry asses on that paper.
  
• Student learns valuable lesson, and learns to be generally skeptical of whatever they read from *any* source. Wikipedia, Britannica, and The New York Times are all rife with errors. With any luck, this will be one of the few things said student will remember long after he's done with your class.
  
• If the student learns from his mistake, and you're a decent human being, offer to drop the bad grade at the end of the term. Learning from mistakes is an integral part of education, and if the student has demonstrated to indeed have learned the lesson, don't punish him for it!
  

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.

Re:Best to learn by experience?

[Rimbo]

When I grew up, my Dad discovered FischerTechnik.

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.

And teach them to do so

[Xelios]

With every answer a few mouse clicks away maybe it's time we start teaching children how to filter the good information from the bad, instead of just teaching them how to regurgitate facts on a piece of paper. Wikipedia is a great research tool when used correctly, Yahoo Answers is a great way to get a quick "close enough" answer to a question that's been bugging you. If kids were taught this simple distinction this debate would be pointless.

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

[Librarian Dan]

What Yahoo Answers demonstrates quite well is that library reference doesn't matter to most people. Few of the questions that get asked on these question sites would be asked of librarians by our beloved patrons. While highly educated librarians sit at the reference desk with their authoritative sources and sensible shoes, folks are going online to look up answers themselves or ask these sites with inconsistent reliability. And why wouldn't they? It's going to be pretty hit-or-miss on getting good answers from librarians on cheat codes and Yu-gi-oh cards. To keep out stats up, we start counting as reference questions helping people sign up for Internet computers and showing someone the difference between the left and right mouse buttons. Some libraries and states are using Virtual Reference so 30 kids can ask a librarian the same homework question. Then the librarian from some unknown library can show them, one at a time, how to use Google well.

Re:Get your answers here!

[trolltalk.com]

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

[ehrichweiss]

"If Yahoo! wants to gain credibility for their QA section, they need to introduce paid overseers that cross-check answers"

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

[McFadden]

The other day I was searching google for information about the Vista MUI (multilingual user interface) which allows Vista Premium and Enterprise to support several languages in a single install (i.e. you can switch the interface between them). And yes, before you start some of us are in positions where we have to work with Vista in one form or another, so don't even go there.

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.