no.stupid.answers

Last week we mentioned here that the Answers.com community has grown to over 5 million members. The growth is encouraging, and not just to us no.stupid.answers bloggers. Answers.com’s Director of Community Development, Scott Moore, shared his thoughts in yesterday’s press release:

“Q&A sites have become a very popular means for getting answers to everyday questions, as well as sharing knowledge on topics close to people’s hearts, and Answers.com is at the forefront of this trend,” said Scott Moore, Director of Community Development.

“Whether it is the BP oil spill disaster, the latest on the iPhone 4 release, or excitement surrounding the FIFA World Cup games, our dedicated community is asking, answering and conversing across a vast collection of categories. Our community programs – Community Outreach, WikiReviewers, Mentoring and Vandal Patrol, to name a few, are delivering on the opportunity to expand our user-base, our data-base and our brand. As we fast approach 9 million answers in our community answer database, it’s clear that, without the wonderful, diverse and knowledgeable members of our community, we wouldn’t have one of the fastest-growing Q&A communities on the Web.”

Here are some other fun facts about Answers.com’s recent growth:

• Answers.com’s U.S. audience size in May 2010 was 45.4 million unique visitors…
• …this ranked the site #21 on the comScore charts.
• Globally, monthly unique visitors were 72 million…
• …which makes Answers.com the 37th highest ranked site worldwide.

There’s a new group on WikiAnswers who makes many small changes in the name of big change: the WikiReviewer Copy Assistants. These little editor elves hop around the site making much-needed improvements to capitalization and spelling.

Individually, these are minute changes, but overall they have a large impact on the quality of questions and answers around the site.

You can read more about the other WikiReviewer roles here.

The Managing Editor for the WikiReviewers is Myrab51. To receive more information, send an e-mail to WikiReviewers @ WikiAnswers.com. Be sure to include your name, username, division you are interested in joining and age. Each member of the WikiReviewers takes a quiz on spelling and grammar before joining, and has to be a minimum of 13 years of age.

You are the hidden wiki-warriors.

Yes, you. You, who can’t let the answer sit there with a ‘there’ instead of ‘their.’ You, who will never surrender to the ‘ur’ and ‘pls’ of txt speak. You, who needs to fix just one more spelling mistake before you call it a night.

You, masters of the keyboards behind the minor edits.

There is now a WikiAnswers Community program just for you: WikiReviewers. The WikiReviewers are dedicated to increasing the quality of the site’s content by clarifying questions, correcting spelling and grammar, balancing answers, and more.

There are separate divisions of the WikiReviewers which target specific tasks: Archive Researchers, Literary Editors, and Copy Editors. There are also Editors at Large; more about the breakdown:

Literary Editors: The Literary Editors’ main job is to locate and confirm plagiarism. They will also add resources to Q&A’s and do rewrites.

Archive Researchers: Archive researchers tackle questions that have remained unanswered for long periods of time. Some of these will be more difficult questions, and will need some looking up. They may recommend some of the more interesting selections for the featured questions list.

Copy Editors: The Copy Editors work on spelling and grammar across the site. They will clarify answers and balance out one-sided or skewed statements in answers.

Editors at Large: In addition to these divisions, there are Editors at Large. The Editors at Large work with all three other divisions to help them complete their tasks.

The Managing Editor for the WikiReviewers is Myrab51. To receive more information, send an e-mail to WikiReviewers @ WikiAnswers.com (no spaces). Be sure to include your name, username, division you are interested in joining and age. Each member of the WikiReviewers takes a quiz on spelling and grammar before joining, and has to be a minimum of 13 years of age.

Jerry Seinfeld may not have said “I don’t want to be a pirate!” if he had met Liz, one of our amazing volunteer supervisors and now an Archive Researcher in the new WikiReviewers program.

She sports the unique moniker of RockandRollPirate when she is contributing to WikiAnswers.  You may also remember her from a Contributor Corner interview she did here on no.stupid.answers.

On top of being an avid reader, photographer, and all-around computer nut she is a poet as well (where does she find the time!?).

So, without further ado, we bring you Liz’s contribution to the Poetry Cafe this week.

[If you would like your original poetry profiled on this blog, please e-mail it to poetry @ wikianswers.com (no spaces) and include your WikiAnswers username!]

“For My Soldier,” by RockandRollPirate

Raindrops fall across my face
Thoughts of you on my mind
My heart quickening it’s pace
Longing for your touch; sweet and kind

All colors have gone to gray
Even though it may be to late
Your safe return is all I pray
Being together is what I anticipate

Then comes that fateful knock…
Knock on my door
The one that left me in shock
Hitting me to my core

Now here I sit, sorrow within
Veiled in black
The American flag over your coffin
For my soldier once in Iraq

It’s all a blur
The salute and praise
All the talk of what you were
I’m lost in a never-ending haze

Living; I don’t know how
With out you by my side
I’m all alone now
No more tears to cry…