Wow. After thirty seconds of looking at that list of online reference sites, I could see myself just plunging in and wallowing in information and trivia and assorted facts and never coming out again. Anyone reading this blog has noticed that it's called 23 Distractions, right?
Okay, okay, focus.
I skimmed the offered articles on online answer sites, and then went off to look at a few of them. My first visit was to WikiAnswers. I would not advise looking at their recent activity page as your introduction to the site; when I saw that "ID2907462660 asked How many miles equals eleven kilometers and said it was the same as How many miles equals 4.8 kilometers," I started getting seriously worried about the questioners, much less the answers. (WikiAnswer's home page shows far more presentable questions.) Exploring the site, I'm not sure I'd want to ask a question there, but I may set up a username later and go answer some of the questions I saw. I dunno, should I feel safer knowing that if I get an answer wrong, someone might come along and correct it, or worried knowing that some moron might come along and replace my accurate answer with nonsense? I saw both kinds of answers as I looked around on the site.
Next, I looked at Yahoo!Answers. I see this site has a different take on answers: where WikiAnswers lets you completely overwrite an earlier answer, Yahoo!Answers lists all answers and lets members vote on them. My gut instinct was to prefer the latter--give the questioner the ability to choose, don't choose for them--but if the questioner knows nothing of the subject, how would they decide? By vote, probably (if there were any), and there's nothing preventing a wrong answer from getting more votes.
So, why use these kinds of sites rather than ask a reference librarian? I can think of several reasons. Some are well-known, like the ability to ask your question at any time, or that you can be anonymous (come on, find me the person who can ask a librarian a sexually explicit question without blushing or sounding threatening...or the librarian who can manage that reference interview with perfect composure). Personally, I prefer taking in information by reading it rather than listening to it, which is what happens when you talk to a librarian. And another reason: I recently read Thomas Mann's The Oxford Guide to Library Research. He points out that many students are taught that asking the librarian for help is cheating. You may not think of that consciously after you leave school, but can you shake off that training easily?
Slam the Boards just left me shaking my head. Yes, people, we're that desperate. We're just going to force knowledge down people's throats. So what if they didn't want to come to a library to ask their questions; we'll insist that they get a library-quality answer anyway. We do have value, we do, we do, we do! (We have shaky self-esteem, is what we have).
