Where Knowledge Rules
A few weeks ago, I came across a Yahoo Answers or About.com style Q&A site called Helium. The concept is that users write articles on a given topic (essentially answer the question), and then other users pick the best article through an A vs B rating system until the best article gets to the top via this bubble sort. The writer of the best article on each topic gets an undisclosed amount of revenue from Helium. What a great concept this is... in theory.
The problem lies in that it is not in an intelligent environment, such as a college or company intranet, but on the classically ignorant internet. There are some articles that are provokatively well written, but for every one of those, there are fifty clumps of random letter arrangements that one would assume are supposed to be some form of communication, but can't be completely sure. How any fifth grade graduate could produce some of this garbage without being under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen or having a seizure that causes them to bang their head on the keyboard repeatedly is beyond me. In the "About Helium" section, it has a sentence that starts: "Helium is a community where you can read..." and before I could finish the sentence, I was laughing hysterically because, quite honestly, I don't think a lot of the users can.
What's worse is that some of these letter piles are rated as the best article above well written content. An example of this would be the topic with the presumptuous title "Why MAC is better than PC." As of this writing, the top ranked article is a letter pile. The second ranked article is written well enough, but it really isn't much of an answer, as it just mentions her dad's computer "broke down." The first truly well written and relevant article is buried in third, and there's an even better article directly below it in fourth. Previous to being reported, the first place article for this topic was an exceptionally awful letter pile followed by three paragraphs of well written content, and concluded with an utterly unreadable letter pile. Obviously, something was wrong here, and a simple Google search with a short string of words from one of the middle paragraphs yielded the site they stole the only readable content from. I have to compliment Helium on acting quickly to remove it after the report was filed, but I have to wonder how nobody else in the Helium community (especially the ones who voted it better than the other articles) could look at the illiteracy as bookends to literacy and not at all wonder if perhaps these two sections were not written by the same person.
Helium: Where Knowledge Rules...
I think there's been a mutiny.
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute



2 comments:
Well I don't quite agree with you. Liking or disliking something is very subjective and just because something didn't appeal to someone doesn't mean it's not worthy of a good rating. I do agree that a lot of people did not go beyond the middle school, but writing on a subject and judging it are two differnt things.
I am not quite aware of the one you have mentioned but my experience has been that they take care of grammar pretty well and the missing punctuation marks and spelling mistakes that would be very common to find in a blog is not acceptable on that site.
Usually the best rated articles do have good content and substance in them.
Well that's my perspective about it........
Thanks for posting, Jyoti, but I must point out that this entry was written in October of 2006. At the time, Helium was a haven for illiteracy. It has since gotten past this mass idiocy, and therefore, people who don't remember what it was like in 2006 won't understand my criticism.
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