The Problem with Yahoo Answers!

Yahoo Answers is a great platform for people to ask and find answers to their questions. It is also a great knowledge base and a continuously enriching one. Barring a few instances, the answer quality is very good and to the point. The answers are also very genuine because there is a huge community of users who rate and select top answers. It also helps users to anonymously connect to other users who can be subject matter experts and get guidance from them. There are no fancy widgets or apps, just a simple question/answer model and users get rewarded for contributing. Its a perfect example of user-driven content and information.

After using Yahoo Answers for a while, I have been noticing that it has started being (mis)used by the young children who are putting in their entire homework on Answers and are rewarding other users who give them complete solutions. Check out the Science and Mathematics category and you can easily find tons of questions posted by users asking for complete solutions with a promise of giving away points for total solutions. I think its totally acceptable if children use it to resolve problems where they are stuck or to get explanations on issues they seem to struggle with, but putting in no effort and posting questions should be totally stopped.

I understand its technically almost impossible to remove questions of these types automatically and putting human reviewers will take the entire shine off Yahoo Answers! After giving it a serious thought, I feel a possible solutions could be to generate a lot of awareness among users about this problem and allow for reporting such type of questions even after they have been resolved. And if the reporting threshold has been reached, the user who asked the question as well as the one who answered it should be warned and docked off some points. I know this will be very controversial and will generate a lot of string opinions, but i think in the long run, we owe it to the school going children.