Many articles have tested the accuracy of Wikipedia and found it to be generally correct, though by no means infallible. I’d never seen a story testing the accuracy of Yahoo Answers until Slate wrote this piece, which should give folks pause about using the service.
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.
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