§ Journal
Method
6 min read
Why every answer needs a footnote
An answer without a source is a guess with good manners. Here is how we decided that citations are the product, not a feature.
Hana Voss
When we started Ostler, the demo answered questions beautifully and nobody trusted it. The answers sounded right. That was the problem.
Trust is a habit, not a feeling
People trust a colleague who says where they read something. So we made the source part of the answer itself: a number after each claim, a page behind each number.
What a citation has to do
A citation is only useful if it points to the paragraph, opens instantly and says something close to what the answer claims. We test all three on every release.
If a claim has no source, Ostler says so. An honest ‘I could not find this’ is worth more than a fluent guess.
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Keep reading
Engineering
How we check that a source really says what we claim
A citation that points at the wrong page is worse than no citation. This is the checking step we run before an answer is shown.
Guides
Writing a company handbook people actually search
Seven habits that make a handbook easier for people, and for tools like ours, to answer questions from.
Research
What we learned from 40,000 unanswered questions
Most unanswered questions are not hard. They are missing a document nobody wrote down.
The Ostler letter
Notes like these, once a month.
New articles, release notes and one useful link.