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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."
This is a librarian's worst nightmare.
Answers: $5
Good Answers: $10
Correct Answers: $20
Well-researched Answers complete with reference: time and materials
Dumb looks are still free.
My blog
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
How could a service that provides such vital information as this, this and this ever be considered anything other than a vital font of knowledge?
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
To quote Maeby from Arrested Development: "that's like comparing apples and a fruit no one's ever heard of."
Yahoo! Answers--the place to go to get your question answered by a certified yahoo.
This guy's the limit!
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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?
Nothing apparently...
http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2179393
TFA doesn't even use the word librarian once.
Just trolling for page hits I assume.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why not just go to the source?
According to Yahoo Answers:
Resolved Question: Is Yahoo Answers reliable?
Best Answer: No way.
But then again it could be wrong. You can hardly trust something you read on that site.
where members can "score" the comments of others... Nah, it'd never work. Sure to collapse from its own inbred weight in MUCH LESS than a decade...
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.
crazy dynamite monkey
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?
Margaret Thatcher wearing nothing but a thin layer of whipped cream.
Do you get your diploma by mail, with full credit for "life experience"?
Or does your college have the word "community" in the title?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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!
Science never settles, never rests.
I looked up how to open a pomegranate on Yahoo! Answers and ended up giving my two-year-old a lobotomy. Great.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
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.
Just callin' it like I see it.
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.
Here are some actual questions I've collected from Yahoo! Answers over time:
- What is the best way to hint to your parents that you are pregnant?
- How do my mum and dad want to renew my wedding vow?
- Do lesbian cheerleaders really exist?
- How powerful does a telescope have to be to see the moon?
- How can I master the art of Levitation?
- Swimming at the waterslides and have to pee really bad... What to do??
- My BODY is my own ENEMY? WHAT would you do if YOU were IN my POSITION?
- What kind of shampoo does Ozzy Osbourne use?
- My nipples are wierd???!!?
- Is it true if you put blood in someones food they will go crazy?
- How many years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds are in 200300 if you divide it by 360?
- Do female animals have G Spot?
- Unfortunately, I have very little common sense.
- Is there a way to make my nostrils bigger without surgery?
- Do mice really explode???
- Automatic toilets scare me. Am I alone?
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".
Deleted
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.)
Anyone who reads somethingawful's weekend web should know how good Yahoo Answers is as a source of information...
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is that you can't flame moronic little fuckwits who ask shite questions or give shite answers. That's what made Usenet useful.
Deleted
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.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Exactly. You don't use Yahoo! Answers to learn basic facts, you use it for questions that are more suited for human answers. You ask "What hotel is near the good bars in Portland, Oregon?" not "What's the melting point of Sn?"
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers
Wikipedia in Yahoo! Answers
Any questions?
a real life librarians worst nightmare is a fire.
;-)
Specifically, a fire in the Central Library caused by some guy with a scar on his face - followed by the State Alchemists telling you to scribe all the books you read because you happen to have photographic memory. Now THAT's a librarian's worst nightmare
No, it's a Patriot Act subpoena complete with gag order.
Man, I hear you. I read this book once, called "The Holy Bible" and I never found out ANYTHING about a bible, much less a holy one. Instead it was a bunch of stuff about this "THE LORD" guy and a bunch of people that followed him or didn't follow him, then some Roman thugs nail his son to a tree. After that it didn't really go anywhere (a couple other guys get nailed to trees, too, but it's kind of anticlimactic after the first one), but it had a pretty spectacular ending where THE LORD gets some payback that I imagine some special effects guys could go crazy with if they ever made it into a movie.
Overall, it was kind of disappointing, though. Never did find out about a bible and whoever wrote it really needed their editor to reel it in.
I use the CustomizeGoogle Forefox plugin to filter out all about.com and answer.com results. Makes life just a little bit simper.
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.
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.
I am a librarian, and my worst nightmare is the same as everyone else's: going to the circus and getting fisted by midgets in the back of the clown car.
The multitude of sites that offer 'answers' for a fee is a non-issue.
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.
Take a look at these examples from paid Q&A site uclue.com, for example.
Paid Q&A/Research
If you want more Yahoo! Answers points or to be highly rated, yes. You also have the problem of the "winner" being decided by somebody who doesn't know. Imagine a quiz show wherein the host doesn't have the right answers, all three contestants ring in and respond, and then the host picks. That's kinda what Yahoo! Answers is.
If you're looking for factual answers, it's also a nightmare due to the fact that it's populated by a metric butt-ton of twelve year olds, doing the asking, answering, and voting. By and large, they don't know how to configure a Cisco 3825 or who suggested that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. The SNR on Yahoo! Answers is so low that it borders on useless as a research tool. When I'm feeling charitable, I'll pop over there and answer a few questions in an area I have expertise in and where the correct answer isn't already written, but if you don't know, cross-check ANYTHING you read there, and whatever you cross-check it with, you probably should have started there.
If you feel that your question can be adequately answered by going over to your local middle school or junior high at recess or lunchtime, getting up on something tall and shouting your question, and you just don't feel like going to the trouble, Yahoo! Answers is a fine resource. Questions in this category tend to include, "whats an awesome sk8board?" and "who here likes fergie?". For more complicated questions, you might get a knowledgeable human passing on the sidewalk to answer, but don't bet on it.
The Slashdot Polls are a more scientific resource, and their warning could be applied to Y!A with a few minor modifications: This whole thing is wildly unreliable. Respondent bias, ignorance, people messing with you, you name it. If you're using these answers to do anything important, you're insane.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
Banana shortage.
Rich