Why Quora Is Not Wikipedia
February 3, 2011 § 25 Comments
By: Seb Paquet
However, there’s another segment of the world’s knowledge that is hazy and tentative. It is emphatically not validated. It is contentious. It is controversial. It’s messy. You could call it pre-knowledge. In pre-knowledge territory, conflicting points of view abound, and nobody’s quite sure what is true. This is the evolutionary edge of human culture.
This is the part where knowledge actually expands. To make a botanical analogy, pre-knowledge is the cambium – the fragile part of the plant where cells divide and generate growth. Some of us live for the enjoyment of being right in there, swimming in pre-knowledge, in that unstable and disorienting soup that stands in between the known and the unknown. Call us explorers, creatives, makers, researchers, or just plain curious people – all of us care about discovering or inventing stuff that just doesn’t exist yet.
This kind of activity doesn’t have a place in Wikipedia, and until recently there wasn’t a generalist, participative website that attracted this kind of social bubbling and intermingling of ideas. The closest thing might have been the Edge website (which incidentally also has a question center), but that is an exclusive club, not something anybody can join.
Why is Quora suddenly becoming a focal point for new insights into anything and everything? Well, one of the key ways knowledge actually grows is through the questions we ask. My hunch is that the kind of question-answer dynamic that Quora offers is what makes it so enthralling to us explorers. By contrast to Wikipedia, Quora is not past-bound. It is future-oriented. With questions you can throw one hypothesis or another out there, and see if it will withstand the test of examination by other minds. On Quora we are free to use our imagination to send dozens of little probes out into what might be.
Simply witnessing how much attention a question attracts already tells you something about whether the time is right to dive deep into it and surface an answer. Startup people can use it as an early indicator of whether a problem is worth trying to solve. (It can also help them see if it has been solved already.) Quora is a creative community in a radically different sense than Wikipedia. I believe the key distinction can be drawn by contrasting their respective gatekeeping functions, with regard to the question: “what shall we include?”
Wikipedia’s gatekeeping is essentially outsourced. By this I mean that the key justification for allowing something to exist on Wikipedia is that it be validated by so-called reliable sources – essentially, scholarly outlets and mainstream news organizations. By contrast, Quora’s gatekeeping is essentially insourced. Unique perspectives are welcomed (and sometimes celebrated); decidedly non-neutral points of view are valued. Not everything is welcome, however; the fate of an answer resides in what the Quora community thinks of the answer.
Basically, inclusion on Quora is decided thusly: Write an answer that too many people view as “not helpful”, and you risk being collapsed. (It must be noted that Quora reviewers have more sway here, but this is something for another blog post.) For creatives, this liberal brand of gatekeeping means that Quora can serve to establish tentative “cognitive outposts” long before the underlying ideas can be endowed with any “notability” from “reliable sources”. As it were, Quora lets us use language to chart out new waters in the sea of knowledge, even if we’re making it up as we go along.
Let me give you an example. The concept of group-forming (something near and dear to my heart) hasn’t really come up strong on the mainstream or academic radar yet. I could certainly try and make a Wikipedia article on it, but it might well end up getting deleted for lack of notability. Moreover, what’s most interesting about group-forming right now is the set of open (or somewhat open) questions around the topic, not the established knowledge. The cambium trumps the dead wood. Using Quora I was able to create the group-forming topic out of thin air, link it into the ontology in a few reasonable places, and let it gradually pick up followers by asking questions tagged with the topic. There are now 114 people following this topic. It’s as if a loose (but somewhat persistent, as subscriptions are generally long-lived things) community had sprouted out of fertile soil. In itself this is a sterling example of what I like to call “ridiculously easy group-forming”.
This kind of affordance to create and structure entirely new ‘places’ and freely use language to bring together communities around interests, while these ideas are still in that vapor stage where a new thing exists only in a few people’s imagination, is perhaps why I most enjoy using Quora. Now, in no way is this the central affordance of Quora, and it may well never be, but it makes a world of difference to those of us who get a kick out of collaboratively exploring, naming, and diving into exciting new ideas.
Seb Paquet is a professor of Computer Science at Teluq-UQAM in Montreal. His research over the past decade has focused on the intersection between social software and knowledge sharing. His blog is Seb’s Open Research and he curates this queue of interesting topics on Quora.
- Picture credit: Fractal Effervescence (2006), David April
I feel pre-smart with pre-knowledge after reading this. Well said.
Thanks for this post it really puts Quora in context. Also, I love your “group-forming” comments and example.
Ah, I summarize this idea as:
Quora:Wikipedia as Twitter:Facebook
Facebook is for people you have known in the past.
Twitter is for people you are getting to know now.
Good point. So to complete the analogy, if meetup.com/dating sites are for people you’d LIKE to know in the future, there’s probably a market for knowledge you’d LIKE to have in the future, a site for definable known-unknowns.
Maybe Quora is that site, but probably not. Known unknowns sounds like a collection of thoughtful questions with no answers, not a bunch of contending ones.
Thought-provoking article, thanks for posting.
To many of us (for instance, pretty much anyone who has been influenced in just about any way by Bourdieu, Foucault, Derrida, and/or Deleuze & Guattari, let alone Freire, Perry, Illich, and/or Piaget), the distinction between what you call “validated” and “pre-” knowledge is itself quite fluid.
Don’t get me weong. Your distinction is neat, especially since it corresponds to two dimensions of a well-known paradigm. But the very notion that knowledge should (or can) be validated is open to discussion, in many spheres of human life.
As for Q&A systems… Many of them can provide an appropriate context for interactions which stretch the “validated and pre- knowledge” paradigm in a certain way. Still not exactly sure as to which part of this possibility may have to do with the system itself. But this is a reason the notion of affordance is so useful, in this case.
I’ve been upfront about my distaste for Quora. and you’re actually giving me even more opportunities to dislike it. But I’m starting to realize that much of what people (used to) like about Quora may relate to the features of the original userbase.
Posts about Quora’s transition away from that original userbase may provide useful insight as to the ways many “social” services fail as they leave that phase. And I don’t mean it as a switch in mindframe from technological determinism to social determinism. But toward an observation of change in a broader frame, which goes beyond simple determinism. It’s not just about the reasons for failure, it’s about the implication of the broad shifts in the complex interactions between all of these tools and all social contexts.
Thanks for that post.
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[...] To wit: A recent post by Techcrunch editor Mike Arrington declared that Quora was about building “a better Wikipedia”. John Keehler at Random Culture recently called it “Wikipedia, Evolved”. In response to these, Teluq-UQAM professor Seb Paquet published an essay at The Quora Review titled “Why Quora is Not Wikipedia&rdquo. [...]
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For professors who have online powerpoint slides and webpages – include their figures and diagrams in your Quora answers, but only after asking for permission first (if there is any ambiguity, ask for permission), and link them to the thread that you w…
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