There's an interesting post at Smart Mobs about how the questions and answers at Yahoo Answers are not generating any question/answer pairs that are worth referencing:

"Users ask questions and then other users answer them. At the same time there is a moderation system where you can vote for the best answer. Presumably, the people whose questions get consistantly moderated well get more points and their moderations get more weight and their answers are given more weight. This idea is really obvious, but has the potential to be as transformative as the Wikipedia. The problem of course is getting people to use it, and to use it in the ways invisioned by the engineers. While there might not be clear right and wrong ways to use a thing like this service, the people who created the service expected it would become more than a way to tell jokes or ask personal questions.

What did they expect? The next big biotech breakthrough?