Scholarly Conversations
Zhihu is a Chinese question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by the community of its users. In Classical Chinese, “Zhihu” means “Do you know?”. Chinese-language internet users nowadays increasingly resort to Zhihu for expert knowledge and insights into various topics.
The scholars in Zhihu evaluating the information by discussing the response with many experts together. Whenever an answer is created, it will be viewed and critiqued by many other users in Zhihu. Everyone can provide their own perspectives to this answer. If most of the users “agree” this respond, it will be pushed to the top of the question. On the other hand, if most of the users in Zhihu “disagree” your response, it will be at the bottom of the website.
Unfortunately, although everyone in the Zhihu is discussing scholarly topics, there is not a rule for the users to determine the authority. Indeed, there are some experts and professionals in this website, but the users cannot determine who is an expert and who isn’t. Thus, the only way that people determine the authority and credibility is to see how many persons press “agree” and “disagree”.
However, some experts are pretty famous in a certain area. When a user creates an account, you will be asked to choose some fields that you are professional or interested in. Once you create a highly-valued answer in a certain field, the other users will “follow” you and sometimes they will “invite” you to answer other questions in the same field. In this way, many celebrities are created and people would prefer to believe their answer more.
In my viewpoint, this website should be improved by validating the answers. The workers in Zhihu should invite some experts to check if the answer is trust-worthy. If the experts agree with this answer, then there should be a sign on this answer. Thus, whenever the users see that sign, they know that this answer is an official-proved answer, which means it is authorized and believable.
