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."
No (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, it can also be divided into two other parts, those who think this post is 'funny', and those who don't.
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Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Newbie. Many of us remember well the times before AOL and MSN dumped their user mass onto Internet.
When they were proprietary BBS networks, everthing was well in the world. Spam was almost non-existent, you didn't have to explain everything to the users, who were clever enough to figure out that inability to ping vax.ox.ac.uk didn't mean you had to reinstall your OS or call a guy in Bangalore to help you. The lion was grazing with the sheep. Or at least devouring them quietly.
The problem Yahoo Answers faces is that you can have trust or you can have anonymity, but you can't have both. In a small professional circle, you can generally trust the answers, because there are enough peers who would jump your shit if you gave wrong answers. In an anonymous world-wide forum, you can't. There's no accountability, and the volume is too high for peers to review anything. Especially if you get paid to provide answers, but NOT paid to provide corrections to answers.
If Yahoo! wants to gain credibility for their QA section, they need to introduce paid overseers that cross-check answers (and each other) and with the authority to add red ink comments inside other people's answers, axe payments to those who give wrong answers, and give a Yahoo! paid bonus to those who give extremely good answers.
Let the users see how well Yahoo! professionals (and not other sheep^Wusers) rate them.
This can only be successful if anonymity is dropped, and someone can't just create a new blank account if eventually booted or rated down (like the trolls do here on slashdot).
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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 wr
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One of the pages that popped up was on Yahoo Answers. It was from someone asking if Vista supported multiple languages. The answe
The paid answers model (Score:4, Informative)
Take a look [uclue.com] at [uclue.com] these [uclue.com] examples [uclue.com] from paid Q&A site uclue.com [uclue.com], for example.
Depends on what you want (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:No (Score:4, Funny)
Get your answers here! (Score:5, Funny)
Good Answers: $10
Correct Answers: $20
Well-researched Answers complete with reference: time and materials
Dumb looks are still free.
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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:Get your answers here! (Score:4, Insightful)
Thomas Crapper craps up Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Fuck Britanicca. Overpriced, high-pressure sales tactics ("buy the encyclopedia and it'll help your kids in school"
I think Britanica is awesome. Sure, Wikipedia can be useful, but at some point, the bad writing just drives me nuts. In, Britannica the articles are generally well written. Paid, professional editors work wonders, and the lack of them is telling in Wikipedia.
Even the previously mentioned Crapper article, is well, crap. Two immediately horrible things jump out. First, a paragraph begins "Yet another purported explanation is that ". It's a choppy sentence that implies the tail end of an enumeration where none exists.
Why does it need to be? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why does it need to be? (Score:5, Funny)
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Ah, so that's the reason why questions get answered 3 months later!
Yes and no, sorta (Score:3, Insightful)
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 peop
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Ehhh, I gotta object to this one. It's way faster to do low-number multiplication in your head than it is to do punch it in a calculator. Can you imagine if you had to whip out a calculator or scrawl on some paper every time you wanted to multiply 12 by 8?? Also, for mathematically inclined people, multiplication tables ar
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I do simple math all the time, ad usually it would be a real PITA to grab a calculator. You probably simply undervalue the ability to do simple multiplication because you can do t simply and effectively. Though it is perhaps possible that you are special and were in a slow class, which is why it took so long. We did it in 12 weeks, with actual lessons involving critical thinking (basic word problems, dividing cheerios
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Their purpose is to be small, simple aid if you have nowhere better to look.
Yahoo Answers is hardly even that. If you've used it for a total of an hour, you'll probably see it's more like a community site for people interested in discussing various topics. A lot of questions there are rhetorical and can't even be answered... Others are asked not because the one asking wants an actual answer, yet others seem to do it as some weird way of trolling. And that's just about the people asking questions. Those answering them are often even worse.
Things like "Why is the sky blue?" Answers
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http://yahooanswerssucks.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
It's one person's attempt to explore the stupidity that is Yahoo Answers. The truth is intelligent, well researched answers get you banned, while mindless drivel gets you a "Best Answer" rating real quick.
What's wrong with Yahoo Answers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What's wrong with Yahoo Answers? (Score:5, Funny)
- Did the Milwaukee Brewers really just give or are in the process of giving Eric Gagne $10 million for 1 year?
- What is a hydroxide ion?
- I have TimeWarner Cable and got the HD Receiver...But I don't wanna pay monthly!?
- I need to find a free download, no buying it, of oregon trail deluxe, can you help me?
- How often should I feed my puppies?
- What can u use for personal femine hygene while pregnant?
- My hands get cold,fingers numb,and skin does not bounce back.what causes this?
- What does it mean if I dream about my crush?
- In the game Yu-Gi-Oh GX Tag Force 2 why do I get a penalty after each duel?
- Where can i play inuyasha games online?
- Who is Gaspard Ulliel currently dating???
- Anyone see Marion Gaborik fly?
- How much do used iPods go for?
- I think I'm ugly and not a good person?
Now I understand how Yahoo! Answers is the perfect reference tool. Ask it any question you want, and some guy might come and give an answer to you...Re:What's wrong with Yahoo Answers? (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, the biggest problem with Yahoo Answers (Score:5, Funny)
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I like the attempt to answer a real question though:
Who is Fidel Castro?
Best Answer:
Before returning to Cuba to lead the Communist Revolution he was a pitcher for the New York Yankees.
Comparing Apples and... What?? (Score:2)
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Wikipedia vs. Yahoo Answers - Deathmatch! (Score:5, Funny)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers [wikipedia.org]
Wikipedia in Yahoo! Answers
Any questions?
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Re:Comparing Apples and... What?? (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? (Score:2)
I would argue that a Librarian's worst nightmare is a book worm.
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http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2179393 [slate.com]
TFA doesn't even use the word librarian once.
Just trolling for page hits I assume.
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Huh? Take another look at your own link!
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Rich
Yahoo answers (Score:2)
yahoo (Score:5, Funny)
so what? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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it is valid to point out where the hivemind is hypocritical and inconsistent from one opinion to the next
No, you are being hypocritical by deliberately describing /. as a hivemind when there are obviously varied opinions here. Hivemind, by definition, means of the same opinion.
If inidividual posters were being inconsistent then it might mean something. As it is all you've done is demonstrate that you have trouble thinking logically.
---
Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product
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The only thing all of Slashdot can really agree on is that this^Wnext year is the Year of Linux on the Desktop. Anything else is just going to start an argument.
Here's a question. (Score:2)
This topic has absolutely nothing to do with "regulation" or a "nanny state".
Please try and compose something vaguely coherant in future. And no, randomly inserting colons and typing something in capitals doesn't magically make your point clear.
And teach them to do so (Score:3, Interesting)
This "problem" of too much information is only going to get wor
So where is the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this any different than 20 years ago?
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Because the students are learning things which are incorrect. They're going through life not only ignorant, but actually misinformed.
This will sound like heresy to many, but there *are* things in life which matter more than grades. Things like level of knowledge and understanding, which aren't really r
Re:So where is the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that schools aren't teaching students how to evaluate sources. If they were, students would learn very quickly not to rely on Yahoo! Answers.
Is Yahoo Answers Reliable? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Is Yahoo Answers Reliable? (Score:5, Funny)
Reference what? (Score:2)
I never got from the article (which for some inexplicable reason is linked to page 2, once again nice job editors.) what it has to do with reference librarians. TFA makes a good point that wikipedia has a definite leg up on yahoo answers in terms of accuracy. It also makes it pretty clear that isn't saying much. But do people really expect accuracy from a social-ask-and-answer site? IF some kid were to use this page as a reference and somehow cite it properly, I think it could lead to a good lesson for th
Why, they might as well use a moderated forum (Score:3, Funny)
Approach (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I suppose all those papers taught me was that the truth is irrelevant. It's all about presentation.
blame the 'tools' not the tools (Score:2, Insightful)
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Good Enough for College (Score:2)
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Or does your college have the word "community" in the title?
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Here (the University of Iowa's [uiowa.edu] Department of Computer Science [uiowa.edu]), the general policy is that Wikipedia is not an academic reference and citing it will get you dinged hard. Reading the Wiki is fine, but you have to go to print media for citations--even preprints of journal articles are considered suspect and only accepted grudgingly.
In my experience talking to people at various institutions, very few places accept Wikipedia as a reference. I would suggest that you talk
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Does that really mean peer reviewed journals? Because you can find just about anything in print claimed as fact.
On the other hand, as i recall from prehistoric times, most teachers wanted 3 sources or some such thing. That would seem to leave out JUST referencing wikipedia. Do they not want that anymore? Or are the others right and his school is a tad underwhelming?
The idea was that if 3 sources agree you are probably golden, if the 1st 3 don't agree you are going to have to keep digging a
Re:Good Enough for College (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Thanks!
good enough for Fry (Score:2)
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Deep enough for college?! (Score:2)
CLICK!
There is a great deal of information on the internet, but it's all a surface gloss of "knowledge", and there is very little depth on anything, anywhere.
Even the science-oriented part of Yahoo Answers is a joke. You don't learn by bombarding "experts" with questions. You learn by hitting the books (or suitable analogues - I'm not a total Luddite.
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I'm a librarian, and my worst nightmare is: (Score:5, Funny)
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Slashdot is more reliable... (Score:2)
I've never came across "Yahoo! answers", but what's the difference between that and a forum somewhere in a desolate place?
It reminds me at some bar, where I've never been other then in my imagination, in a inbred town where the town wiseman explains how the stars are actually firework that was shot too high while everyone nods enlightened.
More reliable sources. (Score:2)
I prefer to get my answers from a more reliable source:
a more reliable source [yahoo.com]
Freedom of speech, a librarian's worst nightmare (Score:2)
I think you're obscuring the point. (Score:2)
I think Wikipedia is compared to Britannica because Wikipedia claims to be an encyclopedia. Yahoo! Answers makes no such claim and that is the reason a comparison between Yahoo! Answers and Britannica has not and will not be made. Yahoo! Answers does not claim to be anything more tha
How to stop that nightmare: (Score:2)
>be a "complete disaster as a traditional reference tool."
So, since we all agree that "traditional reference tools" are of such a great value, and do promote science and useful arts, we have to prevent modern technology making them and the librarians business model obsolete. Lets create a new kind of right, lets call it libraryright ©, to "protect" the librarys and librarians and their hard work from being
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>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."
So, since we all agree that "traditional reference tools" are of such a great value, and do promote science and useful arts, we have to prevent modern technology making them and the librarians business model obsolete. Lets create a new kind of right, lets call it libraryright ©, to "protect" the librarys and libr
my experience (Score:2)
http://morningcuppa.blogspot.com/2006/11/answer-me.html [blogspot.com]
Now you tell me... (Score:5, Funny)
Simple Mathematics (Score:2, Interesting)
Stupid question deserves a stupid answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Actual Yahoo! Questions (Score:5, Funny)
- 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?
Can I just point out (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
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Here's the entire article (Score:2)
Why did the summary link to just the second page of a two page article? Here's the full article on one page [slate.com].
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"
They need to do way instain mother (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone who reads somethingawful's weekend web should know how good Yahoo Answers is as a source of information... [somethingawful.com]
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.
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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 to
Oh! The irony... (Score:2)
Plato: Writing vs. Memorization (Score:2)
Plato lamented how the invention of writing caused men to lose the ability -- formerly widespread, and held in great esteem -- to memorize tens of thousands of lines of verse (e.g. Homer's Iliad).
The invention of the pocket calculator, and its subsequent widespread use in classrooms, raised similar complaints among math teachers in the 1970's.
Every generation raises children conversant with the techno
CustomizeGoogle is your friend (Score:3, Informative)
This article needs cleanup. (Score:3, Funny)
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