Thing 34 - Is this Our Competition? Online Answer Sites

Interestingly, I came across WikiAnswers earlier this week when I was trying to find something out for myself using Google. I can't remember what I was looking for, only that the answer on WikiAnswers was obviously wrong. I tried looking for the answer to "How do you remove melted crayons from clothing?" That's a question I have long experience with, my son having sent a blue sparkly crayon through the library. WikiAnswers came up with using wax paper and an iron to remove the crayon, but I know from experience that WD40 works much better. I looked at laundry as a subject and noted that most of their questions still need answers. Maybe this will be like Wikipedia if it takes off, but today I don't find it very helpful.

I had a similar experience with YahooAnswers. Wrong answers, like "You can't remove it". Too many answers to be useful. I think these sites can be helpful, but for this particular question, it's not working well.

People use these sites for the same reason I use them. They may know about other resources like the library, but the effort required to search for terms in an anonymous database is less than that required to ask a stranger for help. Unless you're an extreme extrovert, interacting with strangers requires an effort. As they evolve, these sites have the potential to become a good reference source, although they would need to clean up the wrong answers and redundencies.

I don't know that Slam the Boards is all that interesting. It makes a nice volunteer activity, but are we librarians who are getting paid to provide service or volunteers sharing expertise? Architects are another set of undervalued professionals, where everyone and his brother thinks that they can just use CAD software to draw plans. Should architects search out opportunities to give their services away on the weekends to show how valuable they are? The value comes in intangibles like the fact that living spaces designed by an architect can feel more comfortable and are more usable. Answers from a librarian are hopefully more likely to be correct and provided more efficiently. But that's intangible, too. I don't really know what I'm getting at here, but Slam the Boards just doesn't make sense to me.