Yahoo! Answers allows participants to ask and answer questions and to rate the answers, contributing to the reputation of the answerers.
It has categories but why not tags?
Would this work inside an organisation? Will it work here?
A lot of the questions look more like discussion-starters than Q&A candidates, to me. How does this do more than a good conversation medium with rich metadata?
Should I be asking these questions at Yahoo! Answers?
Dan,
Quality questions drive conversations, learning and solution finding. The real issue with Q&A systems is they run out of steam after a while. Trivial questions, too few valuable responses, too many people gaming the system.
I think you need a conversation system that has a healthy mix of questions. Brint in the early days was like this – question driven, but there were deep and valuable responses that helped everyone learn.
It is so attractive to imagine that we could scale Q&A using reputation to control quality… somehow automating trust.
The fact that the attempts revert quickly to conversations does point to the value of mixing the two. And we know that conversations don’t really work without shared context and some level of connectedness between the participants…. hence my delight at you stopping by, Denham
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Dan