TY - CONF T1 - Competing to Share Expertise: The Taskcn Knowledge Sharing Community. T2 - ICWSM Y1 - 2008 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - competitions KW - e-commerce KW - e-communities KW - marketplaces KW - online communities KW - participation structures AB -

"Witkeys" are websites in China that form a rapidly growing web-based knowledge market. A user who posts a task also offers a small fee, and many other users submit their answers to compete. The Witkey sites fall in-between aspects of the now-defunct Google Answers (vetted experts answer questions for a fee) and Yahoo Answers (anyone can answer or ask a question). As such, these sites promise new possibilities for knowledge-sharing online communities, perhaps fostering the freelance marketplace of the future. In this paper, we investigate one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. In particular, we apply social network prestige measures to a novel construction of user and task networks based on competitive outcomes to discover the underlying properties of both users and tasks. Our results demonstrate the power of this approach: Our analysis allows us to infer relative expertise of the users and provides an understanding of the participation structure in Taskcn. The results suggest challenges and opportunities for this kind of knowledge sharing medium.

JF - ICWSM UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Crowdsourcing and Knowledge Sharing: Strategic User Behavior on Taskcn T2 - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce Y1 - 2008 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - contests KW - crowdsourcing KW - e-commerce KW - knowledge market KW - learning KW - online communities KW - question-answer sites KW - virtual communities KW - witkey AB -

Witkeys are a thriving type of web-based knowledge sharing market in China, supporting a form of crowdsourcing. In a Witkey site, users offer a small award for a solution to a task, and other users compete to have their solution selected.

In this paper, we examine the behavior of users on one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. On Taskcn, we observed several characteristics in users' activity over time. Most users become inactive after only a few submissions. Others keep attempting tasks. Over time, users tend to select tasks where they are competing against fewer opponents to increase their chances of winning. They will also, perhaps counterproductively, select tasks with higher expected rewards. Yet, on average, they do not increase their chances of winning, and in some categories of tasks, their chances actually decrease. This does not paint the full picture, however, because there is a very small core of successful users who manage not only to win multiple tasks, but to increase their win-to-submission ratio over time. This core group proposes nearly 20% of the winning solutions on the site. The patterns we observe on Taskcn, we believe, hold clues to the future of crowdsourcing and freelance marketplaces, and raise interesting design implications for such sites.

JF - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-60558-169-9 UR - Complete ER -