Yahoo Answers - the good, the bad and the ugly

I've been pondering Yahoo Answers lately. I like the concept that, despite the entire WWW of information, there are still questions that cannot be easily answered except by individuals who possess some relatively unique or specialised knowledge.

The downside of Yahoo Answers is the fact that any clueless twit can, and sadly does, use it.

The questions that genuinely belong in Yahoo Answers are drowned in a sea of questions that aren't appropriate (both in my opinion and Yahoo's own guidelines).

It perplexes me why people would bother asking Yahoo Questions for matters that could be resolved with any trivial WWW search, "What's the postcode for Alice Springs?". Similarly I wonder about the people who ask questions that are so unconstrained as to be effectively unanswerable, "Where should I go on holidays this year?" from a person whose home location, budget and interests are completely unknown. And of course there are the school assignment questions (and often the asker even admits they are a school assignment). And finally there are the sex and toilet questions that one assumes are being asked by children still at the fart joke stage of intellectual development "Where should I go in Sydney to see couples make out?" (real question!). And there are some questions so incoherent that one has no idea what is being asked.

What doubly perplexes me is why people bother to answer most of the above. There will often be half a dozen replies with the same answer regarding the postcode for Alice Springs (you would think one would suffice, although I guess concurrency could explain more than 1 answer but not when they are spread over days). And people will suggest that you rent a cabin by Lake NeverHeardOfIt because the fishing is really good there.

But those are what I might deem the "rational answers". There are of course the people whose answer is "I don't know" or something incoherent or just plain old spam. There are also answers that are so obviously factually erroneous that you wonder if the answerers are complete idiots or just malicious.

Indeed my favourite to date was the question about the time difference between California and Sydney. Now that's a pretty factual question, the answer to which is complicated in practice by the use of daylight savings at different times of year, but still capable of being answered relative to any date or by explaining the daylight saving issue. Alas, the answers ranged from about 6 to 19 hours. Some answers said that Sydney was a day behind California (I guess America must be first at everything!). The most priceless part of it all is that the asker annointed the answer of "12 hours" as being "the best answer" explaining it was in the middle of the range of answers provided. Clearly the asker thought time difference was not a matter of fact but a matter of popular opinion, so I guess they got the answer they deserved.

Yahoo have introduced a complicated system of reportings and levels and points which is intended to somewhat constrain the activities of the rampant idiot or malicious user, but it really weeds out only the most persistent or most malicious or most idiotic users. What destroys Yahoo Answers is the vast army of people whose occasional idiotic question or dumb answer creates a morass of trash in which the genuine question and answers remain lost to view.

This is the same problem that has destroyed Usenet groups and diminishes the worth of just about every public forum on the Internet; they are too open to the public. Of course this is what the traditional custodians of knowledge (the editors, librarians and curators) have been saying for years about the Internet and they are right. But equally they are wrong in thinking/hoping the world is going to return to a state in which they are the providers, custodians and therefore the bottlenecks for information.

The challenge is to find the middle ground, the ways and means to scalably and democratically regulate "public" discussion. I envisage some kind of meritocracy-based group post-hoc moderation, perhaps along the lines of the Slashdot system (but hopefully less complicated -- the Slashdot system was invented by geeks for geeks and can't be explained to anyone even assuming you understand it yourself!). But some days I'd settle for plain old moderator-dictatorship in the interim!

Indeed, I am always impressed that Wikipedia survives the onslaught of public idiocy and malice. I guess the need to be able to edit Wiki is an intellectual barrier to the participation of many of the idiots out there and the readily available "roll back" of Wikipedia is an easy antidote to the malicious. But the price of accuracy on Wiki is the eternal vigilence of its users and its change patrol (even if they do behave like online vigilantes at times).