Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is joining decision-making engine Hunch’s board of directors and will serve as an advisor to the startup. Hunch was recently launched by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake as a platform to help users make decisions spanning a wide array of topics.
To help users make their decisions, Hunch presents them with a brief series of questions that have been submitted by other members, using their responses to help them make their ultimate decision. Wales joining the board makes sense considering that Hunch combines the crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia with a Q&A site. On his blog, Wales wrote that Hunch.com’s “combination of community-sourced content and algorithmically-driven smarts is forging a promising path towards this potential future.”
Since Hunch’s launch in June, Hunch’s users have created more than 5,500 decisions, added more than 30,000 follow-up questions to those decisions, and contributed more than 50,000 decision outcomes. Users have answered more than 28 million THAY (”Teach Hunch About You”) questions and have ‘played’ more than 6 million decisions on Hunch
Fake, who worked on Yahoo Answers before leaving Yahoo, recently told us that “Yahoo Answers is not the answer,” saying that Hunch goes further than most Q&A sites with its algorithms and technology.