TY - CONF T1 - Questions in, Knowledge iN? A study of Naver’s Question Answering Community T2 - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’09) Y1 - 2009 A1 - Kevin K. Nam A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - collective help KW - expertise finding KW - information access KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA KW - question-answering KW - social computing AB -

Large general-purposed community question-answering sites are becoming popular as a new venue for generating knowledge and helping users in their information needs. In this paper we analyze the characteristics of knowledge generation and user participation behavior in the largest question-answering online community in South Korea, Naver Knowledge-iN. We collected and analyzed over 2.6 million question/answer pairs from fifteen categories between 2002 and 2007, and have interviewed twenty six users to gain insights into their motivations,roles, usage and expertise. We find altruism, learning, and competency are frequent motivations for top answerers to participate, but that participation is often highly intermittent. Using a simple measure of user performance, we find that higher levels of participation correlate with better performance. We also observe that users are motivated in part through a point system to build a comprehensive knowledge database. These and other insights have significant implications for future knowledge generating online communities.

JF - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’09) UR - Complete ER - 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 - TY - CONF T1 - CommunityNetSimulator: Using simulations to study online community networks T2 - Communities and Technologies 2007 Y1 - 2007 A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - community dynamics KW - community strucure KW - incentive structures KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA communities KW - reward structures KW - simulation AB -

Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role the way people seek and share information online, forming the basis for knowledge dissemination and accumulation. Consider:

❑ About.com, a popular help site (http://about.com), boasts 30 million distinct users each month

❑ Knowledge-iN, a Korean site (http://kin.naver.com/), has accumulated 1.5 million question and answers.

Many additional sites exist from online stock trading discussions to medicaladvice communities. These range from simple text-based newsgroups to intricate immersive virtual reality multi-user worlds. Unfortunately, the very size of these communities may impede an individual’s ability to find relevant answers or advice. Which replies were written by experts and which by novices? As these help-seeking communities are also often primitive technically, they often cannot help the user distinguish between e.g. expert and novice advice. We would therefore like to find mechanisms to augment their functionality and social life. Research is proceeding to make use of the available structure in online communities to design new systems and  algorithms (e.g., [4], [10]). These are largely focused on social network characteristics of these communities.

However, differing network structures and dynamics will affect possible algorithms that attempt to make use of these networks, but little is known of these impacts.

Accordingly, we developed a CommunityNetSimulator (CNS), a simulator that combines various network models, as well as various new social network analysis techniques that are useful to study online community (or virtual organization) network formation and dynamics.

JF - Communities and Technologies 2007 PB - Springer UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Virtual community maintenance with a collaborative repository T2 - Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting (ASIST'07) Y1 - 2007 A1 - Hansen, Derek L A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Resnick, Paul J A1 - Munson, Sean KW - answer repository KW - expertise sharing KW - knowledge distillation KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA AB -

Virtual communities, like all communities, require ongoing community maintenance activities. This paper presents an empirical study examining how a wiki repository was used to help overcome some of the community maintenance challenges common to help-based email list discussions. Specifically, we found that inclusion of off-topic but related content on the wiki enabled list members to keep the discussion on-topic while still addressing the needs of members. Offloading of repetitive and potentially contentious “holy war” debates to the wiki encouraged list members to summarize their arguments into a meaningful information product. The community's use of the wiki in helping answer frequently asked questions helped attract new members and helped them gain the knowledge they needed to comfortably contribute to the email list. It also helped active participants answer questions more efficiently and effectively by supporting the reuse of information. Finally, the wiki supported peripheral participation by new and former members. This study demonstrates that the architecture of information collections and information flows in an online community has a significant impact on the social processes related to community maintenance.

JF - Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting (ASIST'07) UR - MISSING_URL_KEYWORDS ER -