Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think

[Evan R. Murphy]

Hi all,

2009/7/2 Tim Hawkins <tim.hawkins at mac.com>:
> I would agree that The yahoo Answers model represents a "wisdom of the
> crowds" approach, and you are correct
> in your assessment that this can lead to distortions. [...]
> On yahoo answers many of the responses that are chosen as top answers,
> are subjective in nature, a well written individual
> who writes a convincing or "populist" response to a question, but
> supplies completely wrong information, could easily be promoted
> over a response that was less polished, but however factually correct.

Perhaps in the hypothetical Ubuntu system, wildly popular answers
could be periodically reviewed by "gurus".

> I would propose that we have a better metric for selecting the best
> answer, in that the person posing the question could select the
> answer that fixed the problem for them,  again this ties in with the
> task orientated nature of this approach. A question like "how do i get
> the audio level to persist on my aspire one" would generally solicit a
> number of answers, but only if the answer fixes the problem for the
> questioner should it be chosen as the best answer.
> [...]

I like this. So maybe a rating system more along the lines of, "Did
this answer fix your problem?", instead of, "Digg it".

Regards,
Evan R. Murphy