Yahoo Answers frightens librarians
Jacob Leibenluft dropped dunce hats on the 120 million people using Yahoo Answers.
It’s hard to believe there is something on the Internet that a librarian would despise more than Wikipedia, a controversial resource people, especially students, use when studying.
But Yahoo Answers has Leibenluft questioning the sanity of the world:
While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, 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. It’s every middle-school teacher’s worst nightmare about the Web.
On the good side, he noted these answers regularly arrived for new questions in minutes, if not seconds. No one has to wait long for someone to pull an answer out of thin air and post it in response.
Via Slate
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