Here’s a question for you. How many Q&A sites does the Web really need? Already, there is Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers, ChaCha and dozens beyond. But Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks there is room for one more.

We learned from a tip that he has quietly launched Wikianswers, a Question & Answer site that attempts to create one true, consensus answer for each question, wiki-style. If this sounds familiar it is because Wiki Answers, which is part of Answers.com, does the exact same thing and had 26.7 million unique visitors worldwide in December (comScore). (Yahoo Answers had 144.7 million worldwide uniques in December).

And then there is the little problem of the name. It is supposed to be Wikia Answers! (see second screenshot below), but in the current logo the last “a” of Wikia shares the first “a” of Answers, making it Wikianswers. The already established WikiAnswers might have a problem with that. (The URLs are different: http://answers.wikia.com and http://wiki.answers.com/, respectively)

Update: Wikia Gil Penchina responds in comments:

Wikianswers started at Wikia in November, 2004. The other site with the same name was called FAQFarm back then and changed their name without getting our permission.

Wikianswers is built on the same wiki platform offered by Wikia, and it is already being promoted from Wikia Search. Building up a searchable Q&A repository is a natural add-on for a search engine or any online information database. (See our post on Mahalo Answers).

But, really, How is Wikianswers different than any other Answers site? Unless Wales can satisfy that question, people will ask look for answers to their own questions elsewhere.

Update: Wikia CEO Penchina’s explains below in comments:

Wikia’s Q+A service is in keeping with the wiki-way and that’s what makes it different
- The content is freely licensed under GFDL unlike other answers sites allowing it to be re-used and re-purposed by others for free
- Anyone can contribute (other answers sites require you to register)

We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than a corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in order to take rights away from the contributor.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

But Yahoo has not done anything with the Yahoo Answers other than try to sell it. It still gets tons of traffic and you can get an answer to almost any question pretty much immediately, but its growth has stagnated since last April.

Yet Yahoo killed a promising project that could have made Yahoo Answers even better. It was called Answerpedia. The idea was to take the very best answers from Yahoo Answers (the top 5 or 10 percent) and institutionalize them as authoritative topic pages on their own wiki that could be edited and refined. Hence, Answerpedia (which was only ever used as the project’s codename).

In contrast to Wikipedia, Answerpedia was supposed to be a Wiki of experiential knowledge instead of historical fact. It was the place where people would go to find out things like , “What is the best way to get a reservation at a popular restaurant?” or “How do you go about planning for a kitchen remodel?”

Like many promising projects, Yahoo never let it get past the alpha stage. Maybe the next CEO will revive Answerpedia and other internal projects that never saw the light of day. (The halls of Yahoo are littered with them).

A lot of the answers on Yahoo Answers are worthless, but a small percentage are consistently brilliant. This is especially true in categories where many people have specific knowledge such as home repair, literature, finance, pets, cooking, and parenting. Yet these are also areas where search tends to fail or results are inundated with spam. Authoritative pages on these topics would get great search-engine juice and create the basis for a compelling new destination site within Yahoo as well.

If Yahoo doesn’t do this, someone else will. Already, startups are picking up the slack and experimenting with new ways to improve the core idea of a Q&A site. For instance, Mahalo Answers launched yesterday, adding virtual currency and embedding the best answers in its wiki topic pages. Wiki Answers also takes a collaborative approach to coming up with the best answer.

And what about Answerpedia? Well, for one thing, Yahoo does not own the URL. If you type in http://answerpedia.com/, it redirects you to Facebook, of all places (Update: The site now directs to a simple landing page). That might not be an issue, though, as all of Yahoo’s product use a Yahoo URL (like answerpedia.yahoo.com).

And here’s another curiosity. When I asked a question on Yahoo Answers about what it was and why it never launched, “Yahoo Products” came up a suggested category for the question. As for why it never launched, I am still waiting for an answer to that one.

Update: And we have an answer from someone who says he is one of the founding engineers of Yahoo Answers:

Answerspedia would have been more peanut butter =)

Maybe, but there is a difference between spreading yourself too thin and just sitting on the ball.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yahoo Answers, which was launched in late 2005, is a staggeringly huge site. Recent Comscore stats say the service attracts nearly 150 million monthly visitors worldwide and generates 1.3 billion monthly page views. That’s 67% unique visitor growth in the last year. Yahoo as a whole, though, has nearly 100 billion monthly page views, so it isn’t a material percentage of total Yahoo traffic.

Yahoo Answers doesn’t bring in the premium advertising rates that other properties command, so it isn’t crazy that they’d try to sell it if the price was right. But the logistics of a transfer would be a nightmare – You have to have a Yahoo account to log in, for example. And all the URLs are on Yahoo’s domain name. One of the reasons the service gets so much traffic is because questions tend to get very high search engine placement, so redirecting those URLs properly would be of utmost importance.

There are very few buyers out there that would both be interested in getting those low-CPM page views and would have the cash on hand to make the purchase. So like I said, this is ridiculous on its face, except that we have two independent sources claiming its very much not ridiculous.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Along with the party, Yahoo is publishing data from a Harris Interactive survey, showing how people are using online Q&A sites like Answers. The survey shows that one in three online adults have used a Q&A site, and of these, half say that information from a Q&A site has influenced a decision they have made.

According to the Harris survey, 55 percent of adults would prefer to have their questions answered from a group of individuals rather than an individual response from a friend or family member. And of course, users indicated that that they’d prefer the answers forum to be free with 81 percent saying that they would look to the Internet for answers if the service was free and 77 percent saying that they would look to the Internet if they knew they would receive instantaneous responses.

For this data, Harris surveyed 2,303 adults between November 27 and 29, which, ironically, is the same day that Google announced that they would close their answers program.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

With BitWine, users deem themselves experts in specific categories and establish their per-minute consulting fee. Then when another curious user needs an answer about a given topic, they can browse the experts in that category, select someone whose price and expertise they prefer, and Skype them live. As soon as the transaction is over, the “expert” is paid via PayPal.

We spoke with BitWine co-founder Alon Cohen today, trying to figure out why this site is necessary and how it is different than Yahoo! Answers or Google Answers.

“When you look at Google Answers and Yahoo Answers, you don’t really know who is answering because it’s chat based and text based,” Cohen said. “For instance, I asked a question last night and I had to rephrase the question three times for people to understand me. One question and one answer is usually not enough. You need a visual conversation with someone you trust.”

On BitWine, experts get ratings based on their consultancy performance. Cohen sees this as a way for people to make money in their spare time off of their random hobbies. After all, where else are you going to sell your consulting services on model ship making or knitting?

Sites like this really are only as good as their community size. What good is an “operators are standing by” scenario, when no one is calling in?

“This is a big issue that we have many concerns about: the chicken and the egg,” Cohen said. “You want experts there to begin with and you want enough traffic there so that the experts will stay.”

He said the company will target experts through blogs and discussion forums and also attempt to create affiliations with other Web sites’ questions pages.

BitWine was founded by Cohen, who was previously the co-founder of VocalTec, a VoIP company, and Elad Baron, who recently sold his company, Whale Communications, to Microsoft.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Developers will be able to access YA data by user, search keyword, or category. The company says the API is almost identical to the interface used internally to create the recent Yahoo! Messenger/ Yahoo! Answers combo and the flash badge that Yahoo! offers.

The Yahoo! Messenger plug-ins program has seen some amazing things developed. It will be very cool to see if developers can make good use of this newest API.

See also our profile of Yedda, a similar service with a big 2.0 twist and today’s announcement of the new Facebook API.

Questions will be posed to users by the following:

• Marilyn vos Savant, the holder of world’s highest IQ, begins the promotion today with a question about the best way to help kids in school.
• Friday through Sunday will be your chance to answer a question from Donald Trump, in exchange for a $5,000 spending account.
• CNBC’s finance guru Suze Orman’s prize is 3 oz of pure gold.
• Click and Clack, or Tom and Ray Magliozzi from NPR’s Car Talk will participate. The prize for their question is free gas for a year. And all you get for Donald Trump’s question is $5,000!
• Arrianna Huffington will pose a query about News and Events, the winner will get a trip for two to DC. Thrilling.
• Al Gore’s question is tied to a free 2006 Prius.
• Stephan Hawking’s social science question gets one person a trip to the Smithsonian.
• Bono will close the event and Yahoo! will donate $25k to his One campaign in honor of the winner.

It’s called Ask The Planet, but the company claims that it is legally prohibited from give prizes to anyone outside the US. That’s liable to raise some ire. In fact, for having a name like that, the campaign seems pretty US centered. Likewise, in the spirit of mass page views – I mean scientific inquiry, it appears that the winners will be selected at random and users are encouraged to offer more replies for greater chances to win. The company plans to plaster ads for the campaign all over the US. None the less, looks like an interesting campaign that’s liable to raise the profile of Yahoo! Answers significantly. Is asking your audience to all throw their answers in a hat the best way to solve the world’s most vexing problems? Call me cynical, but I’m not sure it is.