| Type of site | Collaboration Subsidiary of Answers Corporation |
|---|---|
| Available language(s) | English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Tagalog |
| Launched | 2002 (purchased by Answers Corp. in November 2006 and renamed from FAQ Farm in 2007) |
| Current status | Active |
WikiAnswers is an ad-supported wiki-based website where users can submit and answer questions.This site allows users to post and edit questions and answers. WikiAnswers.com uses wiki technology and fundamentals, allowing communal ownership and editing of content. Each question has a "living" answer, which is edited and improved over time by the WikiAnswers.com community. WikiAnswers.com uses an Alternates System – where every answer can have dozens of different questions that "trigger" it. When a contributor asks a question similar to an existing one, the system connects the question to it as an "alternate". This prevents duplicate entries in an effort to promote more cohesive answers.[1]
Created in 2002 by Chris Whitten as FAQ Farm,[2] the site and all corresponding domains were acquired by Answers Corporation in November 2006 to become the user-generated content (UGC) component of Answers.com.[3] Following the acquisition, the product was re-named WikiAnswers.[4] As of August 2011, it had over 13 million answers; 7,000 categories; over 6.6 million contributors; and 1,061 volunteer supervisors. According to comScore May 2010 data, Answers.com sites, including WikiAnswers, had 45.4 million unique visitors in the US.[5] WikiAnswers is a leading Q&A website on the Internet.[6] As of August 2011, the web information company Alexa Internet ranks WikiAnswers and its Answers.com sister sites as the 177th most popular on the Internet.[7]
Contents |
The WikiAnswers.com Community is made up of various online volunteers, most commonly acting as Contributors and Supervisors. Other classifications include Premier Answerers,[8] Special Project Assistants, Mentors, Bug Catchers and those participating in special site-wide programs such as Vandal Patrol, Community Outreach, WikiReviewers, and WikiAnswers’ Influential Teens (WIT). All volunteers are able to contribute in various ways and personalize their user experience through profiles, watchlists, etc.[9]
Contributors form the majority of the WikiAnswers.com community and engage in the site's primary activities: asking and answering questions, improving existing answers and collaborating with others. Each individual addition and edit that a person makes is called a 'contribution', which correlates to one’s total number of contributions and helps form the site’s Top Contributors lists.[10] Participants can also give others “Trust Points” for demonstrating trustworthy and worthwhile contributions.[11]
When a Contributor has reached a certain number of contributions or "Trust Points", or is deemed by Supervisors to have made a significant contribution to the website, they are eligible to receive special recognition awards in the form of profile badges (e.g. 5000 contributions is a Silver Level display emblem). Contributors also have an opportunity to reach additional milestones for their ongoing participation. Special contributor levels include: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Double Platinum and Ruby.
According to the Terms of Use, Answers.com (which includes WikiAnswers) does not claim ownership of contributions. By accepting the Terms of Use and participating on the site, contributors grant a very liberal and permissive license to Answers.com, which in turn sub-licenses the contributions under much less permissive terms to the user. The user is allowed to download the content for personal use only. In particular he or she is not allowed to modify and publish the content without permission from either Answers.com or the copyright owner (the contributor).[12] Individuals are allowed to cite from WikiAnswers in their own writings.[13]
WikiAnswers.com's most active and trusted participants are invited to become volunteer Supervisors. These individuals are given additional tools, known as "Super Powers", enabling them to make higher-level edits. With these powers, they can merge duplicate questions together, feature questions on the home page, block vandals, transform discussion posts into answers and trash questions, amongst other advanced functions.
WikiAnswers.com currently has two types of volunteer Supervisor classifications: Category and Floating. Category Supervisors opt to look after one or more categories of interest. Often, those interested in a certain field or hobby will request to become a Category-specific Supervisor. Floating Supervisors have all of the same tools as Category Supervisors, without opting to look after a certain area of the site. This is a more open-ended way for those without a lot of time to get started.[14]
WikiAnswers.com has a number of special programs designed to help and engage Contributors, Supervisors and other participants. The special programs include:
On February 2, 2009 Answers Corporation announced the establishment of the WikiAnswers.com Scholarship Fund. The Scholarship, administered for Answers Corporation by The Center for Scholarship Administration, awarded twenty scholarships valued at $1,000 each to students planning to enroll in undergraduate college studies during the 2009–2010 academic year.[24] The scholarship is being reopened in 2010. To qualify for the scholarship, students must answer fifty questions. These answers are then judged by an outside third party for quality and accuracy.[25]
WikiAnswers.com is currently ranked as the largest Q&A site on the web by comScore.[5]
As of January 2010, according to Quantcast, a site that publishes traffic statistics, wiki.answers.com has:
On January 28, 2009, Answers Corporation announced that, according to analysis using comScore data (comScore, US Top 200 Web Domains Report, December 2007 vs. December 2008, ranked by % change), WikiAnswers.com's unique monthly visitor count in the U.S. grew 154%, to nearly 16.5 million. This ranks WikiAnswers.com as the fastest growing domain in 2008, of the top 200 in the U.S., as measured by unique monthly visitors.[26]
Question Milestones: