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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.
Yahoo! Answers--the place to go to get your question answered by a certified yahoo.
This guy's the limit!
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?
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.
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
Margaret Thatcher wearing nothing but a thin layer of whipped cream.
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?"
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?
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
Is that you can't flame moronic little fuckwits who ask shite questions or give shite answers. That's what made Usenet useful.
Deleted
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?
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.
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.