Keywords: Q&A, QA, collective help, online communities, expertise sharing, collaborative help

The SocialWorlds Research group has studied a variety of Q&A communities. Our interest has been in how these communities function. The first study was of Java Forum, and it detailed how the community functioned and how expertise was distributed and shared. We then studied Yahoo Answers, along with its sister sites Naver in Korea and Baidu in China. We also compared the three sites. These studies examined why answerer helped, and whether there were intercultural differences.

See the related papers (link above) for more information on the specific projects.