no.stupid.answers

When I think of long-time WikiAnswers member Rharris, I think of lots of things: Mentor, AnswerThon Runner Up, Category Supervisor (of over 20 topics!)… Robin does it all and she does it with a friendly smile.

A little background on Robin:

• She lives in the Bluegrass State, or what she calls ‘Bird Paradise.’
• Some of her time working on WikiAnswers is spent with her grandson on her lap, grabbing for the keyboard.
• Gertie and Tiny are her two dogs, a Doberman and mini Doberman.

How did you originally hear about WikiAnswers?

My dad had asked me to find out where a certain part was located on a car, and somehow I landed on Faq Farm and asked the question.  I thought it was cool that you could ask anything you wanted to know on the site, so I bookmarked it.

Several months later, I came back to ask another question, and to my surprise, it was no longer FaqFarm, but WikiAnswers!  I wanted to contribute to an answer on a question about suicide, and emailed Crystal, asking her to unprotect the question so that I could.  She was very nice and immediately unprotected the question.  When I think about it, I realize that Crystal’s friendly attitude is the reason I immediately felt welcome and kept coming back.

What motivates you to volunteer your time to the WikiAnswers community?

It’s called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder!  (I prefer to say I have extensive organizational skills.) LOL!

When I realized I could edit questions and answers and categorize, I was ecstatic!  I jumped right in and started correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and categorizing questions.

Seriously, I fell in love with WikiAnswers.  I love the community environment and am dedicated to doing all I can do to help people feel welcome, feel as if they are a part of the community, to want to keep coming back, to want to stay.

I’m a Senior Supervisor of the Literature and Language categories, which is absolutely perfect for me, because I have a huge passion for books and English and writing.  As a non-degree English major, WikiAnswers allows me the opportunity to make use of my writing skills and creative talents.

In assisting Deb with the Mentoring Program, I enjoy helping new supervisors in learning the correct ways to use all the tools we have available to improve and enhance WikiAnswers.   What it all boils down to is that I can help to make a difference in the WikiAnswers community and on the site by doing the very things I am passionate about.

What are your areas of expertise?

I’d have to say my area(s) of expertise are my organizational, English, writing, and people skills.  I love using all these in meeting people, making new friends, and helping bring about harmony and unity within the community, not to mention whipping those questions and answers into shape within the categories I supervise.

What is your favorite WikiAnswers feature?

Oh, my gosh!  This one is hard to answer!

It could be the ability to edit questions and edit answers. Or is it being able to work in the community and help to create some old-fashioned neighborly bonding? Perhaps it’s the fact that I meet so many wonderful people from all over the world. Or could it be the thrill I get from helping people learn new things? Then again, maybe it’s that I, myself, have learned so much  by being part of WikiAnswers and am learning new things each day.

As for the physical features of the site, I love to organize, so I’d have to say my favorite feature is recategorizing - and there are so many different ways to go about doing that!  I can split alternate wordings and recat, I can recat from the topics I supervise, I can recat recently asked questions, go to my watchlist and recat from there, or use the advanced search option and recat from there.

What is the funniest question/funniest experience as a Supervisor on WikiAnswers?

I’ve seen so many questions I thought were funny that it would be hard to choose just one.  But I really got a kick out of Where can you find wild camels? And the answer was, “There is an excellent video called “Camels gone wild!” that follows a herd of wild and woolly Camels to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Stay away from Camels in a mosh pit as they can be very dangerous.”  And I loved the question,  What is lack toast and tolerant?

Share a random fact about yourself.

I have a snake phobia, and hate slugs because they remind me of short, fat snakes, and won’t eat mushrooms because they remind me of slimy slugs. I know… that’s crazy! LOL!

I’m a very friendly person who loves to laugh and I see humor in things other people don’t.  I love to meet people, help people, and work with people.

Do you want to be interviewed for the Contributor corner? Just leave a comment below and we’ll get to work.

This week’s Contributor corner features Onarollcarpet, a stay-at-home-mother and joint-business owner who moonlights as a Senior Supervisor, Mentor and Category Supervisor… or is the other way around?

As a self-proclaimed addict, Onarollcarpet can be found spending countless hours splitting and merging, splitting and merging… She appreciates the fact that she can watch WikiAnswers grow daily and enjoys the company of the nice people she’s found along the way.

Find out a little more about this star contributor:

How did you originally hear about WikiAnswers?

I literally stumbled upon it with my StumbleUpon button.

What motivates you to volunteer your time to the WikiAnswers community?

What brought me here initially is the bad spelling, grammar and miscategorization.  What keeps me here is the bad spelling, grammar, miscategorization and the WikiAnswers Supervisors community!

What are your areas of expertise?

Flooring, pregnancy, food, Lupus.

What is your favorite WikiAnswers feature?

Batch Split. I love cleaning out misdirected questions and putting them where they belong. I get so excited seeing unique questions buried in the alternates that I can let free to be answered by the community. I feel like I am letting a wounded bird free to roam the open air.

What is the funniest question/funniest experience as a Supervisor on WikiAnswers?

My favorite question ever asked is How can I clean my room to surprise my mom when I am 11? It isn’t funny at all, it is just really cute and genuine. I was never like that when I was 11. I’m sure that mom will be very happy when all is said and done.

Share a random fact about yourself.

I love salsa.  It is an addiction. Fresh, jarred, any varietyn - bring it with chips and we have a party!  My dog is even named Salsa.

Do you want to be interviewed for the Contributor corner? Just leave a comment below and we’ll get to work.

What do you get when you combine a strong spirit, boundless creativity and a generous personality? Stupid little genius! No, that’s not an insult - it’s quite the compliment (read on to find out why). Stupid little genius has averaged 10,000 contributions a month since she joined just over 6 months ago, and one gets the feeling she’s only just begun.

Stupid little genius is a senior supervisor. She keeps an eye on dozens of categories inside Animal Life, among them (to mention a few obscure ones) Cryptids and Legendary Creatures, Jellyfish and Lemurs, Bushbabies and Aye-Ayes. I could go on… but I’ll let her introduce herself in her own words.

How did you originally hear about WikiAnswers?

I actually found WikiAnswers through Google. Quite boring, I know, but I had just come out of hospital after having surgery on my hip and wasn’t able walk about or get a job or anything.  WikiAnswers gave me the chance to do something constructive with my time. I love to learn and read and such, so it was the perfect place to spend my months of recovery. After a few weeks of playing around I was lucky enough to become a supervisor and ever since then I’ve been addicted!!

What motivates you to volunteer your time to the WikiAnswers community?

It’s just a great community! The people just make it so much fun to contribute. Plus, I can’t bear to see vandalism, incorrect answers, or mis-categorized questions!! I just HAVE to fix them!!

What is your area of expertise?

My main area of expertise has got to be art. Painting, drawing, modeling, animating, I love it all!! I completed a BA(hons) in Fine Art last year, and am looking to get a job somewhere in this area.

I can use all kinds of media, like acrylic, watercolour, pencil, charcoal, pastel, plasticine etc.  I also do a lot of stop-frame animation and this became my final year project at uni! I made little plasticine animals and animated them with Lego men to create stories about man’s effects on the environment. And when I got bored in the middle, I made a little Lego Darth Vader use a light saber to chop off the head of a hippo. Sadly, the tutors wouldn’t let me use this as a look into the future and it got left out of the final film…

On WikiAnswers, I specialize in the animal questions. I know it seems odd at first, but I love to draw and paint animals more than anything else, and as I do, I love to find out all about my subjects! So although I specialize in art, I know a lot about animals too.

What is the funniest question/funniest experience as a Supervisor on WikiAnswers?

There are so many questions that have made me laugh! Others just make you cringe… Here are a few that just made me laugh:

• Can people mutate animals to become Pokemon?
• What do you do to make a radioactive spider out of chemicals?
• How old on average is a 13 year old?
• Can you cook a fish in a dishwasher?

But out of all the questions there is one that bugs me, simply because I cannot find an answer! And that is:

Do bees sneeze?

I really want to know if they can sneeze and the reason why! I’m not really sure why I want to know but I do!

Share a random fact about yourself.

I think the most random thing about me is my username. And it’s got a cute story behind it too!  It was a nickname given to me by my brother many moons ago. We were on holiday by the sea and killing time. I’d just bought a lovely glass chess set and so we set up a game. I’d only played a few times before and my brother is four years older, so naturally he had the upper hand and liked to let you know it. After six moves, I moved my queen into a place where he could take it.  He did this saying “stupid…”. I made my next move while he said “little…”, and then looking at the board, pausing in disbelief he uttered “GENIUS!” as he realised he was in checkmate after only seven moves!

Do you want to be interviewed for the Contributor corner? Just leave a comment below and we’ll get to work.

With all this talk of U.S. primary elections, Democrats, Republicans and the state of California, I thought it might be appropriate to discuss the important issues that Americans should be taking into consideration when deciding the new president in 2008.

The fact is, none of it really matters since we have WikiAnswers anyway. At least, that is according to the question I put forth this WikiAnswers Wednesday:

Could WikiAnswers develop an Artificial Intelligence and take over the planet like on Terminator?

The answer to this query comes from Zanbabe, a WikiAnswers Supervisor and top contributor (so you know she’s good):

Yes, of course. But we choose not to. We like to leave only footprints in the sands of time, and avoid all of that messy taking-over-the world-by-force stuff.

The actual plan (shhh, don’t tell anyone) is to take over the world through answering everyone’s questions. Eventually, the entire world will be so dependent on us that they will do anything we say… because they love us and depend on us, rather than fear us.

So, yeah. We could… but we have higher standards than that. :)

Note the smiley face at the end - you know she means business. I wouldn’t argue with a WikiAnswers Supervisor. Especially when she believes the site is more powerful than the Terminator. Hasta la vista, Zanbabe.

Through a whopping 123,700 - and rapidly rising - contributions, RoyR has been reigning as king of the Top 100 WikiAnswers Contributors list for a while now… Maybe it’s because he’s also been contributing since just about the beginning of the Q&A site’s history.

His Majesty, ever-generous with his time and knowledge, contributes in various ways: he is the Supervisor of the Hobbies and Collectibles category and a Community Assistant across the site.

We take an inside look at what makes RoyR, the number #1 WikiAnswers contributor, tick:

How did you originally hear about WikiAnswers?

WikiAnswers came to me while searching for information about an old firearm. In a Q&A forum, one question about “New York Arms Co.” had attracted hundreds of other questions about old shotguns and I started answering some of them. Then one day there was a notice that the forum was being discontinued and a link to the then-new ‘FaqFarm’ site. I followed the link and have been here ever since.

When Chris, the founder of FaqFarm, put up a ‘help wanted’ ad, I became the first “editor” on the site. At first there were only three choices: Accept, Edit, or Delete. It wasn’t too hard to keep up with a few hundred entries a night even working from a dial-up internet connection and we actually tried to correct all the spelling and grammar in each question.

I managed to survive the transition from FaqFarm to WikiAnswers and here I am.

What motivates you to volunteer your time to the WikiAnswers community?

It can’t be the pay. Must be the perks – a parking space right by the office door, frequent smoke breaks, all the coffee I can drink (and a bathroom right next to my office). Maybe there’s a clue there. I’m addicted to caffeine and nicotine and Wiki-tene.

What is your area of expertise?

I’ve managed to learn a bit about numismatics in 40+ years of collecting coins and several years ago I started researching some firearms that are family hand-me-downs. I now have a ton of reference books on both subjects. I am also a repository of half-remembered useless information. I don’t necessarily know a lot about any subject, but I know where to look for the answers, often right on WikiAnswers or Answers.com.

What is the funniest question/funniest experience as a Supervisor on WikiAnswers?

Some of the best questions are the ones I have to delete because of the “adult” content. But there was “What were Lewis and Clark’s last names?”

A couple of WA answers made me chuckle:

Q: “Who made old shotguns?”

A: “No one. But lots of people made new shotguns a long time ago.”

And the classic (I hope it hasn’t been deleted again):

Q: “How do you get past the blocks at school”?

A: “Step over them. If they’re stacked really high, throw your crayons at them.”

Share a random fact about yourself.

Here are a few that come to mind:

• Eight years in the US Navy. Vietnam era, but not a Vietnam vet.
• Computer programmer, hoping to retire in another year or two.
• Father of two, grandfather of four with the latest arriving just last week. All living close enough to spoil, but far enough away that a weekly or monthly visit is still something special.

This week, we’re meeting Aggie80 from Michigan. When he’s not busy being a father to twins or managing a dojo or maintaining web sites about Genealogy or doing probate work or, you know, saving the world…Aggie80 donates his time and varied knowledge to the WikiAnswers community. What’s next, man!? A white paper on the environmental effects of ladybug migration!?

He knows something about pretty much everything and we’re darn glad he’s around!

How did you originally hear about WikiAnswers?

I don’t recall how I ran across FAQFarm (as the site used to be called), but was immediately pleased with the huge difference between it and the other Q&A communities out there. Within a day or two I had posted questions, created a category or two and volunteered to be a supervisor.

What motivates you to volunteer your time to the WikiAnswers community?

I learn from the questions and get to share my knowledge with others. The other supervisors are a sharp bunch and there are a lot of great participants out there.

What is your area of expertise?

Jack of all trades, master of some. If I could only figure out which ones! Given my military service, law degree, martial arts experience and general worldwide travels, I know a bit about a whole lot of different things.

What is the funniest question/funniest experience as a Supervisor on WikiAnswers?

I love the answers that let a person know that the question is not really a good question and rather dumb, but still provides a decent answer. I saw a recent question “Pics of ass?” that a sharp individual changed to “How do you photograph a donkey?” Very clever and maintains the integrity of WikiAnswers.

Share a random fact about yourself.

I’m a Shellback. For most people that would mean absolutely nothing, but those that do know it’s pretty cool. And I’m a Knight of the Golden Horseshoe. Again, most people won’t have a clue, but the Mountaineers out there know! And my family has been in the New World since 1652.