Quora taps into the 'wisdom of crowds'

Quora is a recently launched social Q&A website that has been receiving more than its fair share of press lately.

It works on a straightforward idea; the user asks a question (either to the community or an individual) and you then wait for the answers. You can also follow questions, topics, or people and read all the updates related to them on your home page. It’s simple enough, but beyond that, some of Quora’s features are proving contentious.

One point of concern for example is the ability of users to edit others queries, potentially changing meanings and putting the whole notion of the ‘open source’ nature of the website into question.

In order to implement quality control on the answers people give, Quora employs a system of “upvoting” and “downvoting.” Upvoting a response displays it higher up in the queue of responses. With enough upvotes, an answer will appear first in the queue, implying that its content is of the highest quality because the community approved it.

We suggest that anyone interested in Quora signs up and give it a try. If you don’t like it, you’ll know right away. If you do like it, you can find yourself getting sucked into the site and jumping from question to question, checking out topics that you never even knew existed.