WikiAnswers, previously known as FAQ Farm, was acquired by Answers Corporation in November 2006 and integrated as the user generated content (UGC) component of Answers.com, an answer engine containing content on over 4 million diverse topics. WikiAnswers is based on a customized version of MediaWiki called "Wiki FAQs" and is run as an online question and answer (Q&A) community. The site content is created by its users, where visitors share what they know and ask about what they don't. This in turn creates wiki Q&As.

Wiki Q&As are 'living' documents, where answers are constantly being improved and updated over time by contributors. This ensures that no identical answer is developed in parallel, and that people aren't required to ask the same questions over and over again. The site currently has over 400 volunteer supervisors, who have the ability to merge and collate duplicate questions to try to provide definitive answers. In 2007, the parent company, Answers.com began to merge some of the content from WikiAnswers into its main reference content.

Founding principles

• Knowledge is not centralized. Everyone has something to share.

• Knowledge can cost nothing to give ... but be tremendously valuable to receive.

• There are millions of generous people in this world.

• Asking questions is the best way to learn, and answering questions is the easiest way to share what you know.

==The Mission==

The mission of the WikiAnswers' community is:

"To enable anyone, anywhere, to ask a question on any topic in their own words and get a cooperatively written human answer."

The Mission of Wikianswers is to provide answers for people on the internet. People who are a member of Wikianswers add questions to categories and answer questions (this is not always the case). These are known as 'contributions'. People who provide more acurrate answers and better questions get trust points from the people who use Wikianswers rather than website's organisers. After a number of contributions or trust points the members get awards (eg. 50 000 contributions).

==How it works==

Technically speaking, WikiAnswers runs on custom "Wiki FAQs" software based on the system developed by the people behind Wikipedia. How it works:

• Someone asks a question.

• Someone answers the question.

• Over time, other contributors improve the wording of the question, make it easier to find, develop the answer, etc.

• When someone else asks the same question, the answer is there.

Through this process, personal interaction between individuals grows public information resources.

These Q&A resources are permanently and freely available for the world on WikiAnswers and can be reprinted by other websites and educators.