WikiAnswers

Infobox_Company
company_name = WikiAnswers.com
company_| company_type = Public (Nasdaq|ANSW)
foundation = 1999
location_city = Jerusalem
location_country = Israel
industry = Internet, computer software
key_people = Robert S Rosenschein, president and chief executive officer
Steven Steinberg, chief financial officer
Bruce D. Smith, chief strategic officer
Jeff Schneiderman, chief technical officer

num_employees = 53
revenue = $10.56 million (ttm) USD (2007) [ [http://moneycentral.msn.com/companyreport?Symbol=ANSW ANSW Company report, financial results, key ratios, income statement - MSN Money ] ]
homepage = [http://www.wiki.answers.com/ wiki.answers.com]

WikiAnswers, previously known as FAQ Farm, was acquired by Answers Corporation in November 2006 and integrated as the user generated content (UGC) component of Answers.com, an answer engine containing content on over 4 million diverse topics. [Answers.com Corporate Information: Company Overview. "Answers.com". Retrieved October 25, 2007] WikiAnswers is based on a customized version of MediaWiki called "Wiki FAQs" and is run as an online question and answer (Q&A) community. [cite web | title = Wiki FAQs | url = http://wiki.answers.com/about/wiki.html | accessdate = 2007-08-07] The site content is created by its users, where visitors share what they know and ask about what they don't. This in turn creates wiki Q&As.

Wiki Q&As are 'living' documents, where answers are constantly being improved and updated over time by contributors. This ensures that no identical answer is developed in parallel, and that people aren't required to ask the same questions over and over again. The site currently has over 400 volunteer supervisors, who have the ability to merge and collate duplicate questions to try to provide definitive answers. [cite web | title = Supervisors | url = http://wiki.answers.com/Q/WikiFAQs:Supervisors | accessdate = 2007-10-25] In 2007, the parent company, Answers.com began to merge some of the content from WikiAnswers into its main reference content.

Founding principles

*Knowledge is not centralized. Everyone has something to share.

*Knowledge can cost nothing to give ... but be tremendously valuable to receive.
*There are millions of generous people in this world.
*Asking questions is the best way to learn, and answering questions is the easiest way to share what you know.

The Mission

The mission of the WikiAnswers' community is:

"To enable anyone, anywhere, to ask a question on any topic in their own words and get a cooperatively written human answer."

The Mission of Wikianswers is to provide answers for people on the internet. People who are a member of Wikianswers add questions to categories and answer questions (this is not always the case). These are known as 'contributions'. People who provide more acurrate answers and better questions get trust points from the people who use Wikianswers rather than website's organisers. After a number of contributions or trust points the members get awards (eg. 50 000 contributions).

How it works

Technically speaking, WikiAnswers runs on custom "Wiki FAQs" software based on the system developed by the people behind Wikipedia. How it works:
*Someone asks a question.
*Someone answers the question.
*Over time, other contributors improve the wording of the question, make it easier to find, develop the answer, etc.
*When someone else asks the same question, the answer is there.

Through this process, personal interaction between individuals grows public information resources. These Q&A resources are permanently and freely available for the world on WikiAnswers and can be reprinted by other websites and educators. The Supervisors, who are volunteers, are assigned to one or more specific topic or to no topic at all and have power over the whole site. They work to insure that questions are assigned to the correct topics, improve grammar and spelling in questions and answers, and eliminate spam, bogus questions and answers. Individuals that show a disregard for the rules of WikiAnswers can be 'blocked' from using the site for specific time periods.

User features

Asking and answering questions is what 99 percent of contributors do on WikiAnswers. The goal is to transform the individual exchange of information into 'living' information resources that can be accessed by anyone, from anywhere ("Wiki FAQs").

Examples
*Improve Answers
*Improve Questions
*Ask and Answer New Questions
*Create a New Topic
*Watch a Topic

ite supervision

WikiAnswers' most active and trusted participants are invited to become site Supervisors. These individuals are given additional tools, which allow them to make higher-level edits. They can merge questions together, split questions apart, block vandals, transform discussion posts into questions and answers, trash questions, flag and unflag answers and much more. There are three types of Supervisors. Category Supervisors oversee one or more topics. This is usually a topic or topics that they feel a special connection to and are willing to watch for spam and vandalism. Floating Supervisors have the same powers as the other Supervisors, but they have a site-wide "job", or have no specific role and oversee everything. Finally, Senior Supervisors are old supervisors that oversee a top-level category and coordinate all the Category Supervisors in that Category. [cite web | title = WikiAnswers Ranks | url = http://wiki.answers.com/static/community_members.html | accessdate = 2008-08-03] There are currently more than 399 supervisors and more are being added each day.

Featured topics

WikiAnswers contains Q&As that are categorized in over 3,600 topics. Examples of topics include:

ite stats

As of Aug. 31, 2008 WikiAnswers contains over 4,250,000 questions in the database and 1,180,000 free registered members. It is currently ranked as the second largest Q&A site on the web by Hitwise. [cite web | title = US Newswire - Answers Corp's WikiAnswers Ranked Second Largest Q&A Site | url = http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/06-26-2007/0004615558&EDATE= | accessdate = 2007-10-13]

As of Oct. 20 2007, according to Quantcast, a site that publishes traffic statistics provided directly from participating sites, WikiAnswers has:

*26,723,427 global page views per month
*9,519,007 unique users per month

For current traffic statistics see: [http://www.quantcast.com/wiki.answers.com/traffic Quantcast WikiAnswers]

References

External links

* [http://wiki.answers.com WikiAnswers website]