WikiAnswers: The Q&A Wiki Community

By admin November 1st, 2007

Something that’s totally crossed my radar until today is WikiAnswers, a service by Answers.com that is seeking to build a complete Q&A knowledge database, or in other words, a Wikipedia for questions and answers. And it just crossed its millionth question today.

The idea in itself is in-genius and gives notable Q&A services Yahoo! Answers and Live QnA a run for their existence: instead of multiple “incomplete” answers to questions and a chosen “winner” out of the bunch, users instead work together — like an ordinary Wiki — to produce complete, edited answer(s). Anyone can ask a question and contribute to answers. Here are a few examples.

The service has so far proved to be a popular section of the otherwise Wikipedia-piggybacker Answers.com, and adds brilliantly to their name and model. And in terms of pure traffic, Comscore reports four million uniques in the U.S. with a 317% growth, making it the second fastest growing site of the top 1500.

Allen Stern, who’s writeup on the service is what alerted me to it in the first place, comments on the brilliance of a simple marketing idea, and I’d have to agree. He also notes that the top users contribute a large amount of effort to the site, and he’s not lying — user Neila222, the top editor of the site as of today, has made 104564 contributions to date — talk about free time!

Looking at the way things have been going for the service, it may just as well end up replacing the original Answers.com site in ample time. And I think with the kind of Google Ads that seem to splatter the service, it can afford to, too.

Most Commented

http://myghillie.info/2007/11/01/wikianswers-the-qa-wiki-community/ My Ghillie » WikiAnswers: The Q&A Wiki Community

[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptBy Sid Yadav – Something that’s totally crossed my radar until today is WikiAnswers , a service by Answers.com that is seeking to build a complete Q&A knowledge database, or in other words, a Wikipedia for … [...]
http://wiki.answers.com Crystal Williams

Hi Sid!

My name is Crystal Williams, and I am the Community Coordinator for WikiAnswers. Your write-up was spot on! WikiAnswers is hugely popular and growing by leaps and bounds every single day. It’s amazing and exciting! I think what sets us apart from other Q&A sites is our community and working together collaboratively on certain features, topics and spotlights. We really are a dedicated team that knows a lot about one another and the site itself. We genuinely care about creating an information resource that is built on quality and the human element. Besides that, we don’t allow duplicate questions (i.e. Why am I losing weight? What are reasons that you might be losing weight?) These are purely examples, but would be merged together for clarity and to make it MUCH easier for anyone, anywhere to get an answer. I have tested some of the other Q&A sites and found it cumbersome and confusing to get an answer to the most basic questions. Most literally return hundreds if not thousands of results – all asking the same question with endless answers. What if these were all merged together and one really great answer or a series of opinions were presented to the user? Well, this is what you get on WikiAnswers. It’s quite unique. I’d love to see you give it a try. You might even consider becoming a Supervisor.

Have a wonderful day!

Crystal Williams
WikiAnswers Community Coordinator
http://www.funadvice.com/ Jeremy

I think that Answers.com has done a great job building up Faqfarm & rebranding it since their acquisition. The only thing I’ve seen “wrong” with their model so far is that the turn around time seems slow…eg, more than 12-18 hours to get an answer. Our Q&A site can be slow, but typically not that slow
http://www.funadvice.com/ Jeremy

I think that Answers.com has done a great job building up Faqfarm & rebranding it since their acquisition. The only thing I've seen “wrong” with their model so far is that the turn around time seems slow…eg, more than 12-18 hours to get an answer. Our Q&A site can be slow, but typically not that slow
http://www.funadvice.com/ Jeremy

I think that Answers.com has done a great job building up Faqfarm & rebranding it since their acquisition. The only thing I've seen “wrong” with their model so far is that the turn around time seems slow…eg, more than 12-18 hours to get an answer. Our Q&A site can be slow, but typically not that slow
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