Yahoo! Answers Gets Slammed in Slate

Andrew Albanese & Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 12/14/2007

Calling the free Yahoo! Answers a "librarian's worst nightmare," Slate writer Jacob Leibenluft last week raised serious questions about the Web's second-most-visited education/reference site on the Internet (after Wikipedia). "While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online," he wrote, "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." (Then again, some librarians have tried to point out the value of trained online reference responses by "Slamming the Boards," as they did on September 10 and plan to repeat.)
Anyone can post a question to Yahoo! Answers and, according to the company's own stats, the service draws 120 million users worldwide and has compiled 400 million answers, "all searchable in its archives." On the plus side, Leibenluft noted, users who post a semi-coherent question are likely to get an answer "almost instantaneously." Also, the Yahoo! Answers community does better in some academic areas, such as physics.
Overall, however, Leibenluft found the service seriously unreliable and quite wanting in comparison to Wikipedia, which has a self-correcting tendency. "The problem isn't just that Yahoo!'s site helps ninth-graders cheat on their homework," he observed. "It's that a lot of the time, it doesn't help them cheat all that well."