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Rating the Questions on Yahoo! Answers
Something new has appeared at Yahoo! Answers. A rating toolbar for each question and for each answer. These provide the ability to quickly click on a "thumbs up/down" to rate each question/answer. There's a button to "report" the question/answer for abuse, another to email the question to a friend and another to add it to your "watch" list, MyWeb, de.licio.us, MyYahoo! or any other RSS reader.
That's all good and well, but how is this going to improve the community at Y! Answers? The Y! Answers blog says this will help "identify content that is valuable to the community" but does it bring it to the forefront while burying the crud? I don't see this happening now but hopefully it will happen soon.
Comments
2
Subscribe to commentssergioAug 11th 2006 11:57PM
The whole thumbs up or down is such a US western culture centric gesture. In the middle east and other parts of the world the thumbs up gesture means "Up yours".
Tomi PoutanenAug 12th 2006 2:35AM
Yahoo followed up with a blog posting providing further context to community ratings in Yahoo Answers:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-d8pH0dcoRKeB12yOcnUQp.9VCFos?bid=8650&yy=2006&mm=8&p=8650
We (I'm the director of Yahoo's social search products) are empowering our users to participate in keeping the interactions on Yahoo Answers relevant. Such community rating mechanisms have proven to be incredibly effective in raising content quality in other online settings and, more importantly, in Yahoo's Asian knowledge search services where we have over three years of operating experience.
Our community of loyal Answers users have responded with fervor in rating; see Wednesday's question by John Wuu as an example:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AipIngz7gASBFexdz.YMQ_Hzy6IX?qid=20060809175338AAmYWUn
While initially we only tally the ratings, future product releases will make use of the ratings to give prominence to highly rated questions and answers, and recognize those individuals whose submissions receive positive ratings.
Watch this space!