Amateur Experts (Yahoo! Answers) Vs. Wisdom Of Crowds & Collective Intelligence (Wikipedia)
Chris F. Masse December 21st, 2007
And the wisdom of crowds won, of course.
[...] Yahoo! Answers—a site where anyone can post a question in plain English, including queries that can’t be answered by a traditional search engine—now draws 120 million users worldwide, according to Yahoo!’s internal stats. The site has compiled 400 million answers, all searchable in its archives. According to the Web tracking company Hitwise, Yahoo! Answers is the second-most-visited education/reference site on the Internet after Wikipedia.
The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While [Yahoo! Answers] is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It’s every middle-school teacher’s worst nightmare about the Web. [...]
In some academic areas—physics is one I’ve noticed—the Answers community consistently does an impressive job of providing accurate answers and a clear explanation of how to get them. But in other disciplines, the site’s record as an educational tool is, to put it charitably, unreliable. [...]
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. [...] Wikipedia’s greatest virtue is that it is self-editing and self-correcting. [...] By contrast, Yahoo! Answers is more devoted to quantity than quality. [...] Wikipedia pages are subject to constant revision. [...] Yahoo!, by contrast, “closes” questions to new answers after a week, although users occasionally post comments afterward. [...] The small, almost obsessive community that built Wikipedia created a culture of reliability. [...] [At Yahoo! Answers:] Everyone gets credit for answering, but there’s not a huge push to make sure the answers are right. [...]
Just like prediction markets are more reliable, over time, than experts.
