no stupid answers

Don’t be a fool on April Fools’ Day! Check out our stash of jokes and riddles on WikiAnswers and be prepared:

• Why cant leopards play hide and seek?
• What did the dirt say to the rain?
• What’s the height of stupidity?
• What is the first thing a gorilla learns in school?

Got some great jokes? Looking for some new material? Share your punch lines or get some new ones from the WikiAnswers community.

And watch your back tomorrow… we’ve got our eyes on you!

As always, I find it fun to see what bloggers have been wanting to know in the past week. Here we go:

• Wonder Years is caught wondering: What is the origin of the word “please”?
• Quite Noteworthy notes the answer to: What is the GOP and how does it work?
• Your Career Service wants you to know how to update your resume.
• Kiss the flame gets hot over the multiple answers to What causes a car to overheat?
• In This Storm researches the answer to What does high Mean Platelet Volume level mean?
• Sleepless in Midland tosses and turns over the answer to What are the Ten Commandments?
• Soniq and The Quill and Nail share with us what it means to be Rickrolled.
• Soulbounce croons: Was Tenika Watson gay?
• EDUC 628 is looking to get educated on What is the purpose of an education?
• Green-Tinted Glasses is past the education and wants to know how much money a garbage collector and a miner earn…

WikiAnswers has teamed up with Itamar Medical — a world-leading developer of cardiac diagnostic equipment — to spread cardiovascular awareness by pumping the Cardiovascular Health category with new questions, answers and edits. The experts at Itamar Medical are officially Supervising the category, contributing their professional knowledge to growing cardiovascular Q&A.

Here are some of Itamar Medical’s contributions so far:

• How do horror movies affect a person’s heart rate?
• Is it good to be able to see your heart beating hard when you work out and less when you aren’t active?
• Where can you find a chart of average heart rates?

This is an excellent way to get experts on a topic to contribute to WikiAnswers Q&A: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. When you use your Bio Page to promote yourself, and then answer questions in your field, you gain credibility and a fresh audience. Not to mention that all the curious people waiting for information are getting quality, thought-out answers directly from the experts.

Are you a professional who might be interested in covering a WikiAnswers topic in your field? If you’d like this kind of opportunity, leave a comment.

This week, Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers Corp, took a minute to explain WikiAnswers in depth to Fred Fishkin of Bloomberg Radio. You can listen here in MP3 format (try this if using Windows Media Player). Or read his own words:

“WikiAnswers is in the spirit of Wikipedia. Wikipedia, as everybody knows, is the world’s largest online encyclopedia. Anybody can edit it. You can edit it. If you see a mistake or want to enrich a page, you can make the Wikipedia page better. Of course, there’s back and forth, you can also vandalize a page. But typically, on the average, the quality of a Wikipedia page goes up over time. And that’s why it’s such a trusted, useful source of information.

Well, we are not the Wikipedia of encyclopedias, we are the Wikipedia of online Q&A. That means that if you have a question, you ask it of our community, you can go to WikiAnswers.com, and type in a question. Anything. It could be health related. It could be relationships. It could be automobiles. It doesn’t matter. You ask a question and other people will answer it.”

As WikiAnswers grows, a lot of people seem to be getting it confused with Wikipedia. The two sites are both wikis, growing based on contributors lending knowledge. Like Bob said, though, WikiAnswers is in a Q&A format, differing from the encyclopedic route of Wikipedia.

Who doesn’t love a little fan mail? Especially when it’s from a student named Grace who got help for her scientific paper defense:

“I know this is kind of shallow. But I just want to say ‘thanks.’ This is ingenious. I’m a student and Answers.com provided me the kind of explanations I needed to fully understand concepts that are really challenging. This is Knowledge Management at its best. Congratulations. I just thought some positive feedback might do you good once in a while.”

I love that term, “knowledge management.” Answers.com: your site for knowledge management.

Thanks, Grace!

One of my various alter egos is that I’m a Supervisor on WikiAnswers for the Tattoos & Body Art category. When the questions aren’t “What does a [fill in random shape, animal or symbol] tattoo symbolize?” they can be amusing. And when they aren’t amusing, they can be… well… WikiAnswers Wednesday fodder.

How much does a nose piercing cost in Philadelphia?

While nearly 83.76% of resident Philadelphians have body piercings (locations on the body vary), there is a process more complicated than just paying money to get pierced.

It’s an involved program that requires first and foremost a 500 word essay describing the applicant’s childhood. If the applicant does not have a childhood, which happens often in Philadelphia, the applicant can describe what they would have liked in a childhood.

The next step to the process is to submit a photo of the applicant standing next to the Liberty Bell, which is deemed humorous for Philadelphians since only tourists would do something like that.

Finally, the payment: An envelope stuffed with cash (amount not specified) must be mailed directly to the grave of Benjamin Franklin. He is the tax collector and also the first Philadelphian to ever get pierced (he had three – can you guess where?).

Most Philadelphians end up bypassing this process and get pierced illegally. They will usually just toast Benny Franklin when drinking towards numbness before the piercing.