Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites

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Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites

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Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems archive
Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems table of contents

Florence, Italy

SESSION: Exploring Web Content table of contents

Pages 865-874

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-60558-011-1

Authors

F. Maxwell Harper	University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Daphne Raban	University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Sheizaf Rafaeli	University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Joseph A. Konstan	University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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ABSTRACT

Question and answer (Q&A) sites such as Yahoo! Answers are places where users ask questions and others answer them. In this paper, we investigate predictors of answer quality through a comparative, controlled field study of responses provided across several online Q&A sites. Along with several quantitative results concerning the effects of factors such as question topic and rhetorical strategy, we present two high-level messages. First, you get what you pay for in Q&A sites. Answer quality was typically higher in Google Answers (a fee-based site) than in the free sites we studied, and paying more money for an answer led to better outcomes. Second, we find that a Q&A site's community of users contributes to its success. Yahoo! Answers, a Q&A site where anybody can answer questions, outperformed sites that depend on specific individuals to answer questions, such as library reference services.

REFERENCES

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