世論 What Japan Thinks

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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I hang out occassionally on the Yahoo! Answers Japan board, and I would rate the reliability of the best answers as moderate as best, which is how most Japanese users view these sites, according to a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into Q&A sites.

Demographics

On the 2nd of June 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor group employed in the private sector completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 81.2% of the sample were male, 10.0% in their twenties, 29.1% in their thirties, 43.6% in their forties, 15.5% in their fifties, and 1.8% in their sixties.

Although trust levels are high, as with Wikipedia the problem is that the casual reader doesn’t know how good the chosen best answer is (on Yahoo! at least; I’m not sure of the others) as it is often the questioner who chooses the answer that sounds best to them, or if it goes to voting then trolls and those gaming the system can outweigh genuine votes. Even with no trolling, a more palatable answer may be chosen over the truth.
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