Content quality - the good the bad and the ugly

Posted on October 6, 2008
Filed Under Answers |

I’ve once heard the following explanation.

If you start a restaurant you will surely put knifes on the table. And although you know that knifes can and do kill people you will have to believe and rely on the fact that the guests will only use them to cut their food.

This is a good introduction to talk about restrictions and hierarchies versus self controlled communities and the impact the approach has on content quality.

Now I do strongly believe that you need a set of rules and protective measures for a community to outline the boundaries and provide general protection for the members. But at the same time having rules that are too strict often leads to forcing users into some direction and usually users don’t like that too much - for a good reason - plus who are we to tell the community what to do on Answers.

Wikipedia does approach content quality with very detailed rules and guidelines and a clear hierarchy of user rights. Very much based on a comparably small group of highly engaged users. And this obviously does work well for them - at least up to a certain extent. Cause within every rather strict hierarchical system there is abuse of power that does create a range of problems on its own.

Now let’s look at Answers. We don’t have very strict rules around what users are allowed to do and what we don’t link to see quite as much.
But obviously there is abuse that is outside of our community guidelines or even outside of our TOC which we are fighting in a variety of ways. Let me mention two.

Community moderation - our platform allows “trusted” users to help us identify and delete abusive content
The more technical approach of Troll hunting - where we try to identify abuse automatically

Another little story from an advertising agency

The producer of a cream or deodorant found that loads of farmers did buy their product as it turned out to be a great insect repellent. “OMG they buy large amounts of our product but for the wrong reason. We need you to set this straight! - Now you can advice in two ways you can spend loads of money to try and fix something that might not even be broken or take advantage of what seemingly is a problem.

We do have a vision on what we would like Answers to be and try to provide the best possible environment to nurture this vision but we don’t want to force our users to only one scenario.

There is loads of excellent content on Yahoo! Answers. There is excellent advice that is so very much tailored to fit the needs of the individual asking for information. In so many cases this is where an encyclopaedia will fail to provide the information needed.

Let me give you an example:

I did move to London in 2007 and thus had to do my tax return in the UK at some point in time. Now there is a wealth of information on the web about tax return in Great Britain but I was not able to interpret this information to my specific case as I was not able to clearly see if I was in one or another group of people for quite a few questions that I did have.

Here Answers is brilliant as you can get answers to your very specific question - and let me hint on something it will be even more brilliant in the future

There are however some examples of the seemingly poor quality of content on Answers as well. And we do work on making sure we don’t promote the poor quality content too much.

But Answers is different compared to sites like Wikipedia as the knowledge is much more experiential than encyclopaedic.

On Answers you can easily say this is the best digital camera you get for 200 bucks. It’s often much more opinion based than just providing pure facts.

What are your thoughts, experiences about strict rules versus self controlled communities to control content quality?

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