A critical technical analysis of AnswersRoom.coms here. Do you agree or disagree with them? If so, why?
Question: AnswersRoom.coms work on the premise of incentive networks. Points to motivate the social dynamics of knowledge. But...
1) Within each category and sub-category, the entries are still sparse. It is ridden with lots of questions which should be in some other categories, and lots of similar plus repeated questions.
Should there be some form of automatic rejection (user-informed) of questions which does not seem to fit in the chosen category and are too common there?
2) The questions stream into Answers at a very rapid rate, few are interesting and novel, and most of them are written by seemingly immature people fixated on sexual topics.
Is it possible to automatically rate the interestingness of these questions and feature them more often and longer?
3) Lots of answers come directly ("plagarised")from "googleable" sources such as Wikipedia and Answers.com. Most users here want originality. Can there be a way to determine the originality of answers by querying the web?
Answer:
1. Y!A is still in BETA operation. As such the Y!A team are more than likely still refining categories. As the issue of a repeated question, I do agree with this. I am hoping that Y!A will implent a feature whereby a user is perhaps forced to search Y!A first for an answer to their question, or just before confirmation of posing a question, Y!A will auto search within the answers database for similar questions and prompt the user to read these first before posting.
2. the internet is a free place to post. unfortunately since Y!A is based upon the already huge database of yahoo! users, there will be people who can simple waltz by and post a crazy question, instead of intentially signing up with separate personal details etc to post a specialised question. because of this, other 'competing' sites do not have this problem. it is one of an inherent nature, and the only way around this is to have Y!A hire more moderators to ensure the integrity of the questions
3. Most people are probably too scared to google, or in some cases, too lazy to search for results, or simply know that there are other people who can do the job better. To actually write up a 'plagiarism' script would be a mammoth task as each time a person posts a result to Y!A, yahoo will need to query the entire web for results that match that of what the answerer wrote. This is inefficient and unecessary. If most users want orginiality, they have the choice to exercise that right by choosing the most original answer. Sometimes, wikipedia can give the most comprehensive answer, and would be a great source of information at times.
my thoughts:
the reward system is too rewarding. points should only be based on best answers and 2nd/3rd best answers if applicable(lower points for them). to reward points on posting an answer, even a 1 letter response is ridiculous and promotes idiotic answering at times, which entices users to post idiotic questions to get more idiotic answers.
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You sound like the kind of person who is able to create a rival site. Go for it and good luck.
Very good points - I feel as if I answer the same questions 20 times a week - I think the problem is that too many restrictions will turn people off - I think if points were only allocated to those who answered best, there would produce a more interesting repetoire of answers...
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