Yahoo Answers

Have you seen Yahoo answers at answers.yahoo.com? Users ask questions and then other users answer them. At the same time there is a moderation system where you can vote for the best answer. Presumably, the people whose questions get consistantly moderated well get more points and their moderations get more weight and their answers are given more weight. This idea is really obvious, but has the potential to be as transformative as the Wikipedia. The problem of course is that to get people to use it, other people have to be using it already. Google has a system where people pay money for an answer and only handpicked group of contractors are allowed to answer any question. I think that this is a much less exciting option.

In Korea, the website Naver (www.naver.com) used this idea in 2004 to not only become one of the top websites in Korea, but to drive their search engine to dominant marketshare over Yahoo and Google.

So Yahoo launched answers in the US around a week ago and they have a substantial amount of traffic. But here are some random questions and answers:

Question: A woman has 7 children, half of them are boys.How can this be possible?
Answer: maybe one of them is bi! or one could be gay.

Question: Why will a ducks quack not echo?
Answer: wE HAVE MANY DUCKS ON OUR FARM AND WHEN THEY GET STARTED THEY RAISE HELL AND ECHO AS WELL

Question: Biologically, is there a reason as to why the age of the girl must be les than the age of the guy in a couple?
...

Question: If evolution is correct and there is no god why cant I shoot you?
...

You have to see these to believe them.

So what is the problem with Yahoo Answers? The implementation seems to be working very hard to reduce questions like this. Surely the Korean site wouldn't be the top Korean destination on the net for information if it was filled with garbage like this. Are there cultural differences causing this type of system not to work in the United States? I mean if more people believe that aliens are likely to exist than that evolution is likely to be true, maybe using the collective intelligence will never work in this country. That seems pretty sad.