WikiAnswers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page.

It needs sources or references that appear in third-party publications. Tagged since December 2007.
It may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.Tagged since December 2007.
It may require general cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.Tagged since December 2007.

WikiAnswers.com

Type	Public (NASDAQ: ANSW)
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Jerusalem, Israel
Key people	Robert S Rosenschein, president and chief executive officer Steven Steinberg, chief financial officer Bruce D. Smith, chief strategic officer Jeff Schneiderman, chief technical officer
Industry	Internet, computer software
Revenue	$10.56 million (ttm) USD (2007)^[1]
Employees	53
Website	[1]

WikiAnswers, previously known as FAQ Farm, was acquired by Answers Corporation in November 2006 and integrated as the user generated content (UGC) component of Answers.com, an answer engine containing content on over 4 million diverse topics.^[2] WikiAnswers is based on a customized version of MediaWiki called "Wiki FAQs" and is run as an online question and answer (Q&A) community.^[3] The site content is created by its users, where visitors share what they know and ask about what they don't. This in turn creates wiki Q&As.

Wiki Q&As are 'living' documents, where answers are constantly being improved and updated over time by contributors. This ensures that no identical answer is developed in parallel, and that people aren't required to ask the same questions over and over again. The site currently has over 300 volunteer supervisors, who have the ability to merge and collate duplicate questions to try to provide definitive answers.^[4] In 2007, the parent company, Answers.com began to merge some of the content from WikiAnswers into its main reference content.

1 Founding principles
2 The Mission
3 How it works
4 User features
5 Site supervision
6 Featured topics
7 Site stats
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Founding principles

Knowledge is not centralized. Everyone has something to share.

Knowledge can cost nothing to give ... but be tremendously valuable to receive.

There are millions of generous people in this world.

Asking questions is the best way to learn, and answering questions is the easiest way to share what you know.

[edit] The Mission

The mission of the WikiAnswers' community is:

"To enable anyone, anywhere, to ask a question on any topic in their own words and get a cooperatively written human answer."

[edit] How it works

Technically speaking, WikiAnswers runs on custom "Wiki FAQs" software based on the system developed by the people behind Wikipedia. How it works:

Someone asks a question.

Someone answers the question.

Over time, other contributors improve the wording of the question, make it easier to find, develop the answer, etc.

When someone else asks the same question, the answer is there.

Through this process, personal interaction between individuals grows public information resources.

These Q&A resources are permanently and freely available for the world on WikiAnswers and can be reprinted by other websites and educators.

The Supervisors, volunteers who have demonstrated commitment and excellence, are assigned to one or more specific topic or to no topic at all and have power over the whole site. They work to insure that questions are assigned to the correct topics, improve grammar and spelling in questions and answers, and eliminate spam, bogus questions and answers.

Individuals that show a disregard for the rules of WikiAnswers can be 'blocked' from using the site for specific time periods.

[edit] User features

Asking and answering questions is what 99 percent of contributors do on WikiAnswers. The goal is to transform the individual exchange of information into 'living' information resources that can be accessed by anyone, from anywhere ("Wiki FAQs").

Examples

Improve Answers

Improve Questions

Ask and Answer New Questions

Create a New Topic

Watch a Topic

[edit] Site supervision

WikiAnswers most active and trusted participants are invited to become site Supervisors. These individuals are given additional tools, which allow them to make higher-level edits. They can merge questions together, split questions apart, block vandals, transform discussion posts into questions and answers, trash questions, flag and unflag answers and much more.

There is three types of Supervisors. Category Supervisors oversee one or more topics. This is usually a topic or topics that they feel a special connection to and are willing to watch for spam and vandalism. Floating Supervisors have the same powers as the other Supervisors, but they have a site-wide "job", or have no specific role and oversee everything. Finally, Senior Supervisors are old supervisors that oversee a top-level category and coordinate all the Category Supervisors in that Category.^[5] There are currently more than 360 supervisors and more are being added each day.

[edit] Featured topics

WikiAnswers contains Q&As that are categorized in over 2,000 topics. Examples of topics include:

Astronomy and Space	Movies
Cars & Vehicles	MP3 Players and Audio Systems
Celebrities	Music
Computers	Online Shopping
Distances and Travel Times	Organic Gardening
Education and College	Pets
Employment Laws	Pokemon
Health	Prehistoric Animals
Home Improvement	Recipes
Insurance	Sports
Investing and Financial Markets	Supernatural and the Occult
Manners and Etiquette	US States and Cities
Maritime History	World Languages

[edit] Site stats

As of Jan. 6, 2008 WikiAnswers contains over 1,400,000 questions in the database and 475,000 free registered members. It is currently ranked as the second largest Q&A site on the web by Hitwise.^[6]

As of Oct. 20 2007, according to Quantcast, a site that publishes traffic statistics provided directly from participating sites, WikiAnswers has: