For a brief, shining stretch of internet history, WikiAnswers wasn’t just a Q&A platform — it was a village of curiosity.
Its heart wasn’t in algorithms or ad networks, but in human beings asking real questions and answering them with warmth, humor, and sometimes—surprising insight.
And standing proudly at the gates of that digital village were the Orange People.
Each character had a role — a construction worker, a scientist, a teacher, a traveler — forming a bright, hopeful mosaic of human inquiry. They were designed as a way to humanize a growing platform, to remind visitors that learning online could still feel friendly.
The Orange Man family became the de facto ambassadors of the Answers.com era. They were used on everything from profile avatars to help icons, even internal presentations. Their simple, expressive forms — always facing outward, ready to engage — came to represent a rare kind of web optimism: the idea that anyone could teach, anyone could learn.
By 2011, as corporate tides shifted and layoffs hit the Jerusalem-based team, the lights at WikiAnswers began to dim. But in corners of the web — nostalgic screenshots, archived pages, and now, this very archive — the Orange People remain.
They remind us that before AI chatbots and data pipelines, the web once ran on community.
And in that community, bright little figures stood side by side — cheerful, simple, human-shaped — silently saying,
“Ask me anything.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20090213131640/http://wiki.answers.com//Q//FAQ