We all know about Answers.com: as the world’s greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia, it’s the best way to get facts and information on over four million topics. 

If you want to read Madonna’s biography or learn more about London, that’s your one-stop shop.  But what about the detailed questions? What if you already know background information about Madonna, but want to know if she is still married to Guy Ritchie? Or you want to know what the best way is to get from London to Paris?

That’s where WikiAnswers comes in…

WikiAnswers? What is it?

In short: WikiAnswers is the user-generated component of Answers.com where visitors contribute what they know and ask about what they don’t.

If Answers.com is the world’s greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia, specializing in answers based on reference information, then WikiAnswers is all about Q&A the wiki way, focusing on specific questions asked by anybody about anything. As a wiki website, answers on WikiAnswers are contributed by a community that constantly collaborates to add, edit and improve answers, with the goal of creating one Q&A database for all to use.

There are other Q&A sites out there… What’s new about WikiAnswers?

The wiki-model is all about creating a collaborative directory of questions and answers. Everyone is encouraged to add to and improve each other’s answers instead of asking and answering the same questions over and over again. In addition, WikiAnswers has over 200 dedicated Supervisors – real people who are passionate about their professional, hobbies and interests,– combing through the site to answer questions, eliminate spam, improve spelling and grammar and help other contributors.

Who contributes to WikiAnswers?

Everyone – from all walks of life - has knowledge to share, whether it’s about alternative medicine, paying taxes or even search engines!

Take a look at some contributors’ bio pages (just click on their user names) and you can get a sense of the diverse – yet all dedicated – members of this collaborative community.

Anything else to add?

It’s really easy to get started – to register, all you need is a user name, password and email address. You don’t need a user name to ask and answer (which is another thing that makes us unique) but it is highly recommended so that you can be notified when your questions are answered or improvements are made. You also get to do more on the site with a user name.

Take a moment to browse answered or unanswered questions in any category or peruse only the categories you’re interested in. Of course, you can just ask a question or find questions to answer in the search bar at the top of any page.

Finally, you can check out the new Help Center, packed with all the information you need to know.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sphere: Related Content