How is WikiAnswers different from Wikipedia?

Answer 1

Definitely! ;-) Amazon.com's Askville is another great new question and answer website. They did a very good job on it. Askville, Yahoo Answers, MSN Live, and many of the other new Q&A sites are essentially what FAQ Farm was in 2002. They're Q&A bulletin boards. (Albiet, much more professional, well-financed versions.) On other sites, the same questions get asked over and over again. People post individual answers and those answers can never be improved upon. It's one-on-one, isolated communication. The important aspect of people helping each other by asking and answering questions is there with all the sites. FAQ Farm also goes a step further. Our community is actually growing FAQs. We're creating permanent Q&A resources for the world to use, as opposed to just offering a forum for Q&A.

Answer 2

Yahoo! Answers seemingly has many advantages over WikiAnswers.

It allows multiple people to answer each question, generally gets more views and answers per question, and allows the answers to be rated. It also has a higher Alexa ranking, faster load times, and an easier site for finding and editing your existing questions and answers.

However, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages

1) None of the multiple answers may be correct. With a tiny 4-day window to answer, you may get no answers, or many that are all wrong or nonsense.

2) The answers, and the ratings on answers, are provided by users who may have only the slightest knowledge of the subject.

3) Once answered, a question goes to the knowledge base, where there may be dozens of duplicate questions, and no way to tell the right answers from the wrong answers, because they were decided by "voting" and never edited.

4) If a question is located, the subtext may ask for an answer, and receive one, that is totally useless to other users as a general reference.

5) Nonsense is seldom removed, and even nonsense answers can be voted as the best.

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Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com) really doesn't have any advantages over WikiAnswers. In fact, WikiAnswers could do a lot of bad things to the usability and function of their website, and WA would still be miles ahead of Y! Answers. Why is this? Observe:

Yahoo! Answers doesn't match questions to previous answers, or even suggest them before allowing you to post your question. What this means is that several instances of the same question could show up within hours or even minutes of each other, all doomed to fall away into the recesses of a database, never to be seen or used again. WikiAnswers, on the other hand, is designed to have the community create one good strong answer, and link multiple "wordings" of the same question to it. This way, lots of people work on the same answer, rather a bunch of people all shouting their own in 50 words or less.

Yahoo! Answers also suffers greatly from it's user base.Y! Answers is plagued with people who never seem to have heard of Google. Consequently, you have a lot of very simple questions (such as "How do I delete a file from my iPod?") that could easily be solved with only 30 seconds on Google. These simple questions get in the way of real questions which actually require or benefit from human response, rather than Google.

Another aspect of Yahoo! Answer's user base which greatly detriments from the usefulness of the service is the user's insistence on asking questions whose answers would be beneficial only to the asker and no one else. These are questions like "What's a good MySpace name?"

To be fair, WikiAnswers isn't perfect either. The rich text WYSIWIG editor does have a few bugs, but overall it produces reliable results. Y! Answers requires you to see a preview of your answer before posting it, unlike WikiAnswers. Unfortunately for Yahoo, it's users mostly don't care about good spelling or grammar, which is what the preview feature was designed to encourage.

WikiAnswers, while growing, still has a relatively small user base, compared to its competitors (such as Y! Answers and Wikipedia), and so answers and additional wordings for questions can be both scarce and untested.

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Answer 3

The main difference between WikiAnswers and other search engines is that WikiAnswers ... isn't a search engine. WikiAnswers is a Q&A database, and not anywhere close to a search engine, so that sets it far apart from other search engines. Plus, anyone can ask, and answer, and categorize, questions at will, without having to sign up. Plus, your question is either here or it isn't. If it isn't, you can ask. On search engines, if your question isn't there, it isn't there, and you can't do anything about it.

Answer 4

WikiAnswers and Wikipedia DifferencesThe major difference between WikiAnswers and Wikipedia is the focus. Wikipedia is based on an encyclopedia-type format, with the goal being to provide a comprehensive article on a broad subject. WikiAnswers focuses on providing answers to questions that ask for specific information about a subject. For example, if someone wants to know about an NFL football team in general, Wikipedia articles will cover that. If someone wants to know how many times the team won the Super Bowl or other specific information about the team or the players, WikiAnswers allows you to ask questions to get that specific information.

Answer 5

WikiAnswers is a website where individuals can post questions that other users can then answer or edits answers. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, that, like WikiAnswers, anyone can edits. Rather than having questions and answers, Wikipedia has full articles on a variety of topics. The content on Wikipedia is generally held to a higher standard than that on WikiAnswers, though it should still be taken with a grain of salt. To check out Wikipedia, follow the link below.

Answer 6

Some ways that Quora and WikiAnswers differ:

- Quora has a much smaller community

- WikiAnswers questions have one answer, continually edited (hence the "wiki")

- Quora has multiple answers by multiple contributors, with the ability to vote answers up

- WikiAnswers has a reference side with licensed articles on thousands of topics

Can you think of more differences between the sites? Add your own opinion.

Answer 7

Good for questions and answers.