hunderdown - 4:06 pm on Jan 1, 2007 (gmt 0)

Part of the problem with Yahoo Answers is that you can't ask your own questions until you've earned a sufficient number of points in answering other people's questions. This gives cheaters an incentive to plagiarise

Well, actually that's not quite true. I joined to try out the system, and you get 100 points on joining, which is enough to ask 20 questions--more than enough for anyone. You also get two points just for answering at all (even a one-word answer) and only ten for getting best answer selected. Even if you write a long, copied answer you may not get the ten. So if people JUST want to pile up points, then answering lots of questions is the way to go. But there is ego involved, and I think the ones doing the copying are trying to look like experts, and maybe get some traffic to their web sites. (Though I can't see that Yahoo Answers would drive a lot of traffic--the Q&As are pretty ephemeral, and Yahoo uses "nofollow" in all URLs.)