weathersystems

Q&A sites Sites like stackexchange, r/askscience, quora, and lesswrong.com/questions all have a similar format. One person asks a question. Everyone gives their own answer. You can vote on answers to (hopefully) raise the best answer to the top. When the answer becomes out of date, if you're lucky, the original author will update their comment. There are some benefits with this approach. Competition Each answer competes with the other answers for top position. This competition does a decent job at sorting out the good from the bad answers. Reward These sites usually have some sort of karma system where you get cred for writing better answers. Maybe that reward system motivates people to answer questions more often? Seems at least possible. Ease The format is very easy to understand. If you have a question, ask it. If you know an answer to a question and want to help out, you give your answer. There is no complicated coordination required. If you're reading through the answers and think one is best, upvote. There are also some key problems with this approach. Duplicate questions All those sites have many duplicate questions. Even stackexchange only flags duplicates without removing them. Duplicate questions make searching for answers inefficient. They also make writing answers inefficient, as you may be covering the same ground someone else has on a duplicate question. Duplicate answers Even on a single question post, you'll have many different answers. One per commenter. The asker of the question or (more importantly) the person who finds this post from google, is left to sort through the answers and make a judgement call on which one is best. That shouldn't be the job of the person who writes or reads the question. Presumably they're not experts on the topic... as they're the ones who don't know the answer. There is the voting mechanism, true, but it's not perfect. I often find the best answer on a stackoverflow post is the 5th one down, mostly beca