TY - CONF T1 - Culture Matters: A Survey Study of Social Q&A Behavior T2 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’11) Y1 - 2011 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Morris, Meredith Ringel A1 - Jaime Teevan A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - collaborative help KW - collective help KW - intercultural KW - QA KW - social search AB -

Online social networking tools are used around the world by people to ask questions of their friends, because friends provide direct, reliable, contextualized, and interactive responses. However, although the tools used in different cultures for question asking are often very similar, the way they are used can be very different, reflecting unique inherent cultural characteristics. We present the results of a survey designed to elicit cultural differences in people’s social question asking behaviors across the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and India. The survey received responses from 933 people distributed across the four countries who held similar job roles and were employed by a single organization. Responses included information about the questions they ask via social networking tools, and their motivations for asking and answering questions online. The results reveal culture as a consistently significant factor in predicting people’s social question and answer behavior. The prominent cultural differences we observe might be traced to people’s inherent cultural characteristics (e.g., their cognitive patterns and social orientation), and should be comprehensively considered in designing social search systems.

JF - Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’11) UR - Complete ER - 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 -