Vast majority find user-generated Q&A trustworthy
Recently japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by RealWorld RealResearch into Q&A site usage, a field which has seen two moderate-sized players, one of them being Microsoft, shut down their services this year.
Demographics
Over the 1st and 2nd of September 2009 1,013 members of the RealWorld RealResearch monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 61.2% of the sample were male, 8.1% in their teens, 8.6% in their twenties, 11.1% in their thirties, 41.1% in their forties, 19.1% in their fifties, and 12.1% aged sixty or older.
I’ve used an English-language Q&A site, and although I did find that the majority of answers were reasonably correct, with the public voting it was a bit too easy for wrong but playing to the crowd answers to do better than an unpopular but more correct opinion. I’ve since stopped visiting after realising how much time I was wasting, as they are quite addictive places!
The article also mentions that on the 9th of September 2009 Yahoo! Chiebukuro had surpassed 30 million questions and 80 million answers!
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