Exploring characteristics and effects of user participation in online social Q&A sites

Authors

  • Chirag Shah UNC Chapel Hill
  • Jung Sun Oh UNC Chapel Hill
  • Sanghee Oh UNC Chapel Hill

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v13i9.2182

Keywords:

User participation, Social Q&A, Yahoo! Answers, Google Answers, Online information seeking

Abstract

People are seeking more meaningful and customized information than what is obtained by keywords-based queries and document retrieval through a search engine. In this paper, we look at a set of such services, referred to as social Q&A sites. With sites such as Google Answers, and primarily Yahoo! Answers, we attempt to understand various characteristics of user participation and their possible effects on the design and success of the site. We discuss these social Q&A sites by comparing their designs based on user participation and point out the effects and defects of each. We show that active user participation is the core component of these sites. We further analyze rich data collected from more than 55,000 Yahoo! Answers user profiles to understand the nature of user participation, and the quality of this participation. With our analysis we discover that Yahoo! Answers model implicitly encourages users to make an active contribution. An important contribution of the work reported here is the framework with which various factors relating to user participation in social Q&A sites can be studied.

Author Biographies

Chirag Shah, UNC Chapel Hill

Chirag Shah is a doctoral students at School of Information & Library Science (SILS) at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is working with Gary Marchionini and Diane Kelly on issues related to collaborative information seeking and social searching, as well as contextual information mining for digital preservation.

Jung Sun Oh, UNC Chapel Hill

Jung Sun Oh is a doctoral students at School of Information & Library Science (SILS) at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in theoretical and methodological problems related to the concept of shared information space, especially in the context of social bookmarking and social Q&A.

Sanghee Oh, UNC Chapel Hill

Sanghee Oh is a doctoral students at School of Information & Library Science (SILS) at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her recent work has involved investigating people?s behaviors and motivation to participate in social Q&A, as well as building digital library curriculum.

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Published

2008-08-30

How to Cite

Shah, C., Oh, J. S., & Oh, S. (2008). Exploring characteristics and effects of user participation in online social Q&A sites. First Monday, 13(9). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v13i9.2182