世論 What Japan Thinks

This survey by Media Interactive, reported on by japan.internet.com, into Q&A sites found that most people find them reliable enough.

Demographics

Between the 2nd and 4th of February 2010 1,000 members of the Media Interactive monitor group who had used or even just viewed Q&A sites completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.4% of the sample were male, 1.3% in their teens, 17.6% in their twenties, 32.9% in their thirties, 29.0% in their forties, 15.0% in their fifties, and 4.2% in their sixties.

I did use Yahoo! Answers in English for a bit, both asking and answering, but… The answers were mostly OK, but auite often I’d see incorrect information being promoted, making it even worse than Wikipedia for reliability.
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At the start of this month japan.internet.com in conjunction with goo Research got 1,089 replies to an internet-based questionnaire about the use of Question and Answer sites in particular, and looking up things in general. The user demographics were 23.0% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 7.2% in their fifties, and 2.8% in their sixties. 53.3% of the sample were female.

From the English language point of view, I’ve only ever questioned and answered on Experts Exchange in the dim and distant past, and glanced at Google Answers once or twice recently. I’m much more of a BBS and Usenet person myself.

One question not addressed by this survey (or perhaps only addressed if you pay money to get the full survey results) is how much people trust the answers they get. However, even a seemingly simple question like that may not have a simple answer. Thinking of Wikipedia, for instance (which isn’t a Q&A site, admittedly), depending on the information I am searching, my trust level varies. In fact, I have recently stopped linking to it as I feel that because the pointed-to page can change, I may no longer be referring to the same information that I was pointing to in the past; in addition for controversial subjects the page can get frozen, or at least adopted as a base line, at a non-neutral point of view, despite the protestations of neutrality from the ‘pedia-philes.
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