Don't worry – it's not because it's going to replace us anytime soon – it's because it's an incredibly crappy reference tool which is (unfortunately) also one of the most widely used on the Net, second only to Wikipedia.
The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising
once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable
window into how people look for information online, it looks like a
complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad
research habits, rewards people who post things that aren't true, and
frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It's every
middle-school teacher's worst nightmare about the Web.
The article has some good insight on why a site like Wikipedia succeeds while a site like Yahoo! Answers fails. (On that note, I've mentioned it a lot before but Ask MetaFilter probably comes closest to getting the “community answer site” idea right of any I've seen.)
(via Reddit)
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