WikiAnswers

» see wiki.answers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

If you searched in English in 2009 you landed on WikiAnswers whether you meant to or not. That was true in Ankara as much as anywhere, because the search box does not know where you are sitting. You typed a question, Google gave you wiki.answers.com near the top, and the page answered a slightly different question than the one you had asked.

It began as FAQ Farm, put up in 2002 by Chris Whitten, who would later go off and build WikiTree. The premise was simple enough to explain in a sentence. Wikipedia had proved that strangers would maintain an article together; FAQ Farm assumed strangers would maintain an answer together. One question, one answer, edit history behind it, anybody allowed in.

Answers Corporation bought it in November 2006 and renamed it WikiAnswers, and for a few years it was the fastest-growing thing the company had. By September 2009 comScore had Answers.com as the thirteenth most visited site in the United States with 56.4 million monthly uniques, and the community side of the house was doing most of that work. In the fall of that year the parent folded WikiAnswers into the main domain to collect the traffic in one place.

~ the record ~

~ the boom ~

The feature that made it competitive was question merging. Yahoo Answers let a thousand people ask the same thing a thousand ways and produced a thousand separate pages. WikiAnswers had supervisors whose whole job was to notice that "how tall is Mount Everest" and "what is the height of Everest" were the same question, merge them, and point every phrasing at the one answer.

That is a good idea for readers and a very good idea for a search engine. Every merged alternate wording became another door into the same page. The site grew a long tail of millions of questions, each with a single canonical answer, each catching a slightly different query. For a while it looked like the sanest structure anyone had put on a Q&A site.

~ the fall ~

The problem was who was actually typing. An open Q&A site indexed by Google fills up with homework, and homework produces questions nobody would ask out loud along with answers written by whoever got there first. The one-answer rule meant a wrong answer sat alone with nothing beside it to contradict it, and the tone of the place drifted somewhere between a study group and a chat room.

The corporate side was worse. AFCV Holdings took Answers.com private for $127 million in February 2011 and closed the Jerusalem office in 2012. Apax Partners bought the whole thing for $900 million in August 2014, which is a valuation with $471 million of debt underneath it, and in March 2017 the parent filed Chapter 11. None of that had anything to do with the people merging questions, and all of it decided what happened to them.

~ the day it died ~

In May 2018 the site was rebuilt. The entire user database was purged, editing was switched off, and what had been a wiki became a static archive that reads like one. No announcement went out that anyone recorded, and the people who had spent a decade moderating found their accounts gone.

Every question and answer written between 2005 and 2018 was reattributed to a single account called Wiki Contributor. Millions of pages, thousands of contributors, one name on all of it. Answers.com still keeps a page explaining who that account represents, which is more of a headstone than most communities get, and it thanks the supervisors and topic experts for uncounted hours of work that no longer has anyone's name attached to it.

~ the long tail ~

wiki.answers.com still resolves. It sends you to answers.com, which is alive under System1 with a couple of dozen employees in St. Louis and an app aimed at homework help, so this grave is the wiki rather than the domain. The archive is readable and unamendable, which for a site whose only argument was that anybody could fix a wrong answer is a specific kind of ending.

What went with it is the merge. Nobody runs that model at scale anymore. Every Q&A site standing today is a voting site, and the reason is that voting scales without paying anybody, while deciding that two questions are the same question requires a person who cares.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »