TY - CONF T1 - Knowledge Sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone Knows Something T2 - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web Y1 - 2008 A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Bakshy, Eytan A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - expertise finding KW - expertise sharing KW - help seeking KW - knowledge sharing KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA communities KW - question answering KW - social network analysis AB -

Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one's curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA's knowledge sharing and activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we find that some users focus narrowly on specific topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users' interests. We find that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after. We combine both user attributes and answer characteristics to predict, within a given category, whether a particular answer will be chosen as the best answer by the asker.

JF - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web UR - Complete ER -