How to improve Quality of Yahoo Answers?

[mukeshdak]

I see many people ask questions which are

1. too vague (don't mention, what they need to know )
2. Answer can be easily by googling or wikipedia, howstuffworks or by searching on any encyclopedia
3. very easy, they don't do enough homework and leave all the burden for the person who answer.

this deteriorate quality of yahoo answers, & waste precious time of intellectuals. What yahoo could do to improve this

e.g. penalty for vague questions, rating of individual asker, increasing cost of questions (in terms of point), any good idea.

[sam m]

i think that everyone should be required to rate questions they look at,and an automatic -10 points if you answer "dont know"

[Brandon C]

I see some less than intelligent questions and answers on here all the time. Some people even ask opinionated questions and answers. Some people pick what what they believe is the best answer but is not the best answer. Some people use poor grammar and their question is barely understandable.

-One way I believe to improve the quality is to make asking questions 10 or even 20 points for vague or "stupid" questions. Rewarding good questions and answers even more would likely also help. Slang in sentences or misspelled would should pe penalized along with "don't knows" as an answer. Ranking questions would help!

Some people don't want to "google" or look in an on line encyclopedia and make people answer simple questions which waste time from more important questions. People put grammatically incorrect sentence with misspelled words and there is a spell check!

[misterFR33ZE]

Its apparent you wanna get rid of all the 'dumb' people. But what better place for them to come? Whether or not you think they are too lazy to go to another site, they did make a little effort to come here.

As far as a penalty, unless Yahoo was willing to review each individual situation, this type of thing could easily be abused to censor in more controversial sections (such as religion & spirituality)

Yahoo's goal is probably to cater to the needs of ALL people (or at least as many as they can) not necessarily to create a place exclusively for intellectuals like yourself.

The 'deterioration' of this site is very similar to that of any site that gets popular. Because it is impossible to regulate w/o a ridiculous amount of time/work it is not economical for any website to maintain perfect integrity. Facebook, for example, used to be exclusively for college students and kept its integrity by allowing only users who had college-supplied email addresses. Now anyone can have an account and it is sure to have spammers and other companies looking for cheap ads coming by the hundreds, maybe thousands.

Although, it would be nice to see some of what you mentioned put into effect, it would not be economical, popular or ideal.

P.S. Anyone who wanted to ask a dumb question could easily just make a new account every time there old one received a bad rating.

One thing I think they could do is maybe create a separate section for those that reach a certain level and/or have at least a certain amount of best answers. This could be a section free of idiots, just a thought

[manik]

Try to understand the actual ask and write answer in as much easy and descriptive way you can with the sufficient info and links,step-by-step suggestions so that even novice users of pc can easily realize your suggestion and follow those.

[hobo]

Charging 10-15 points per question would cut down on some of the nonsense but you'd always get silliness slipping through. Screening users before they could sign up is a possibility but most folks would just lie their way in. So I think Yahoo is stuck between a rock & a hard place here but you know - this site doesn't belong to intellectuals but to everyone.