Comments on: a librarian’s worst nightmare?

By: Marianaria

Marianaria — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:54:18 +0000

Thanks for the post. I signed up for Yahoo Answers and am now answering questions, mostly in Words & Wordplay, Quotations, and Books (whatever the heading is.) A few observations after my few days at the site:

Many of those questions could be answered doing a websearch. I’m not sure why those posting don’t do that. Of course, the spelling on many questions is atrocious, so that may have kept them from finding what they wanted.

Many of the questions could be handled by a phone call to a library.

I guess it’s a sign of progress that students are asking for someone to do their homework, rather than having a parent go to the library to do it for them ….

By: Susie Lorand

Susie Lorand — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:27:46 +0000

Today’s “Shelf Check” imagines some worse librarian nightmares: http://shelfcheck.blogspot.com/2007/12/shelf-check.html .

By: Priscilla

Priscilla — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:32:39 +0000

This has nothing to do with Yahoo Answers and more about your worst nightmare. I worked at the library of a big football university and we would have to lock up our outside book drops on game weekends because people would use them as toilets. It was very sad and very stinky.

By: Simon Chamberlain

Simon Chamberlain — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:14:37 +0000

I would have responded to you over there, but my life is too short to grapple with their system (especially seeing as I’d have to register as well).

To reply here: AskMe is populated by smart people like you (and occasionally me). Whereas Yahoo Answers isn’t ;-).

That was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but seriously: YA is pretty bad for factual questions – my favourite example was the ‘what’s the capital of Nigeria?’ question, where people kept answering (and voting up) “Lagos”, even after other people had said “it used to be Lagos, it isn’t anymore, here’s a link to [CIA Factbook/WP/etc] to confirm it”.

You do make some good points about the social type questions, the ones that don’t have a simple factual answer. Even then, YA seems to have short and not often useful answers, though. I’m hugely passionate about the power of online communities to help meet people’s information needs; I just don’t think that YA is very successful at doing so (whereas AskMe, and some sites I’m involved in, are).