MetaFilter: Going Your Way

Lately, people seem to be catching the librarian bug and flocking to the Internet to ask questions in many different places. Both Yahoo and Google started as search tools and spawned answers sites as a way of creating community and, one suspects, generating revenue (Google Answers launched in April 2002 and Yahoo Answers in December 2005). But what do you get when you start with an existing community and then create an online space where visitors can ask questions? You get Ask MetaFilter, “a discussion area for sharing knowledge among members of MetaFilter.” Moderated by a librarian—me!—the site has been around since December 2003. I have since answered over 2500 questions—that's two a day for two and a half years.

Established in 1999, MetaFilter is a community web log where members post and discuss links to interesting things on the web. It has over 40,000 members, is the 27th most linked-to blog, according to Technorati, and has thousands of Bloglines subscribers. A lifetime membership costs five bucks. In December 2003, the site introduced a new feature: Ask MetaFilter. The premise was straightforward: members could ask questions of other site members—query the hive mind—using the site's blog format. Since then, over 40,000 questions have been addressed in areas ranging from general shopping to relationship advice.

But beware: this is not some 2.0 type of replacement library. Ask MetaFilter is part of the world-wide information tool kit that includes the library, Google, NPR, cereal boxes, people on the bus, and flyers stapled to telephone poles. However, librarians definitely have a presence. I know at least 50 members who work in libraries or go to library school; we are part of what is called the MeFi Librarian Posse. This network of librarians and their databases can be useful for answering all sorts of questions, as this exceptional example shows: Question: “How can I get my hands on a Vienna phonebook from circa 1938....I would love to see the apartment where my late grandfather lived before fleeing the Nazis. Unfortunately, nobody in the family knows the address.” Answer: “I work at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I think we might be able to get the street address for you....To more specifically answer your question, we have the Vienna telephone books from the 30s on microfilm.”

Almost 6000 MetaFilter users (one in six members) have asked at least one question, and over 8600 have given at least one answer. How do we know? All these interactions happen on a blog; all the questions and answers are archived, searchable, and linkable as well as tagged and categorized. Users can post to the site only when they're logged in, so anyone can see who has asked what and who has answered what. How's that for ready reference?

The transparency of the site is part of what makes MetaFilter so popular. When Ask MetaFilter began, many members already knew one another via the larger MetaFilter community. Our members are doctors, lawyers, editors, moms, dads, grandparents, students, TV personalities, and, of course, librarians. We have members who work at the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, the Library of Congress, and all the major blog companies. Since the information comes from trusted sources, people have asked all sorts of unusual or uncomfortable questions as, for example, “Is it common for women to wear pantyliners all the time?” or “Help me relearn how to romance my wife.”

Imagine trying to answer these questions at the library. If you were lucky, you'd get information from teen self-help books and some statistics from a web site belonging to the feminine hygiene industry. The collaboration involved in discussing a topic in order to help someone find an answer relevant to them is what keeps the site vital. As with Wikipedia, bad information gets rooted out and good information gets corroborated and amplified.

The other thing that keeps the site vital is a certain amount of moderation, which is where I come in. I am one of two moderators; Matt Haughey, the creator of the web site, is the other. To provide an atmosphere where people can feel comfortable asking questions, we have a short set of guidelines for commenting on a question. After several years of questions and answers, most people know the drill and don't break the code of conduct. If they do, however, we step in and remove off-topic comments and settle disputes.

Since a lot of the offline work I do now is with computers, not libraries, it's good to feel that I'm keeping my hand in reference. As more reference goes virtual, the line between the library and the nonlibrary world of questions and answers becomes fuzzy and indistinct. One of the things I learned in library school was that when people have an information need, they'll always ask people they know before they'll ask a librarian. The trick is making sure that librarians are some of the people they know. So what about that Vienna phonebook question? It had 38 comments, culminating in a set of photos taken three weeks later of the apartment where the question asker's mother and grandparents lived before they fled in 1939. He had been able to visit there thanks to the help of those librarians.