Ellie on Yahoo! Answers

Which Quora Users use Yahoo! answers?

I do! I have answered questions on Yahoo! Answers since 2007. I am not a frequent user, i.e. I have almost made it to Level 3. I am Javelina on Yahoo! Answers. I like the user interface, and I like Yahoo! Avatars, which are visible on Yahoo! Answers. Moderation is responsive.

There is a surprising amount of accumulated information on Yahoo! Answers. I do worry about its longevity. This is why I believe that Yahoo! Answers, silly as some content may be, is an important repository of (online) knowledge. 

Me with a sweet piggy friend
with help from Yahoo! Avatars

Much of our web of knowledge has grown around Wikipedia. It is primarily due to the fact that Wikipedia is free to access, I suspect. That sounds harsh, but it isn't intended to be. This is my reasoning: It is well and good to cite Royal Society proceedings, or journal articles published by Elsevier or the ACM, but it really isn't of much help to people who cannot access them without an Athens or Shibboleth (academic or other institutional) login access.

Anyway, let's consider the phrase "Fertile Crescent". The founder of the Oriental Studies Institute affiliated with the University of Chicago, Henry Breasted, PhD (first American to receive a doctorate in Egyptology, in Berlin, as it wasn't taught here in 1906), is credited with that term. It refers to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, which is mostly Iraq and some of Iran now. 

Where and when did this academician first use the term? Wikipedia provides a source link, which leads to... the reply to a Yahoo! Answers question. So the origin of the expression, Fertile Crescent, which is the cradle of civilization, is ultimately  sourced via a somewhat trusted online source to Yahoo!  

EDIT

Sorry, it now directs to Yahoo! Education. Answers and Education are close enough in the Yahoo! product line, I think...?

Amusing comments worth preserving

Stephen McInerney 2014

education.yahoo.com doesn't work at all? redirects to Yahoo. How on earth can they keep breaking their own product so badly?

Me 

Yahoo is pathetically broken, by Yahoo. So many pleasant, useful Yahoo        services have been discontinued without any replacement or explanation why their demise was called for. As you found in my answer, many of the formerly well-maintained persistent URLs on Yahoo subdomains now just forward to www dot yahoo dot com.

Stephen McInerney  

You think their 404 page would be seeing a lot of traffic... maybe they should put some prime ads there.

                    😊😁💡