• Title/Summary/Keyword: Online Q&A sites

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Understanding Information Sharing Among Scientists Through a Professional Online Community: Analyses on Interaction Patterns and Contents

  • Shin, Eun-Ja;Lee, Guiohk;Choi, Heeyoon
    • Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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    • v.5 no.4
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    • pp.26-38
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    • 2017
  • Even through many professional organizations increasingly use Q&A sites in their online communities for information sharing, there are few studies which examine what is really going on in the Q&A activities in professional online communities (POC). This study aims to examine the interaction patterns and contents posted in the Q&A site of a POC, KOSEN, a science and technology online community in South Korea, focusing on how actively scientific information and knowledge are shared. The interaction patterns among the participants were identified through social network analysis (SNA) and the contents in the Q&As were examined by content analysis. The results show that the overall network indicated a moderate level of participation and connection and answerers especially tended to be active. Also, there are different interaction patterns depending on academic fields. Relatively few participants were posting leaders who seemed to steer the overall interactions. Furthermore, some content related to manipulation and explanation for experiments, which are in urgent need, seem to be posted in the sites more frequently with more amounts. Combining both SNA and content analysis, this study demonstrated how actively information and knowledge is shared and what types of contents are exchanged. The findings have practical implications for POC managers and practitioners.

How Design Elements of a Social Q&A Site Influence New Users' Continuance Behavior: An Application of Logistic Regression and XGBoost Techniques (소셜 Q&A 사이트의 디자인 요소가 신규 사용자의 지속사용에 미치는 영향: 로지스틱 회귀분석과 XGBoost 기법의 적용)

  • Minhyung Kang
    • Knowledge Management Research
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    • v.24 no.2
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    • pp.161-183
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    • 2023
  • Social Q&A sites, where individuals freely ask and answer each other online, play an important role as a public knowledge repository. For their sustainable growth, social Q&A sites constantly need new askers and new answerers. However, previous studies have focused only on answerers, with little attention to new users or askers. This study examines the factors encouraging new users to continue using social Q&A sites based on motivational affordance theory and self-determination theory, and also investigates whether the factors differ depending on the types of users (i.e., new asker vs. new answerer). In addition, the moderating effect of prior experience with a member Q&A site was examined. Using logistic regression and XGBoost, we analyzed online activity data from 25,000 users in the Stack Exchange Network and found that design elements with motivational affordances had significant impacts on new users' continuance behavior. The experience of a member Q&A site negatively moderated the influence of the antecedents of continuance behavior. Interestingly, the influence of editing was not significant in the analysis of new users as a whole, but was significant in the separate analyses of askers (significantly negative) and answerers (significantly positive).

Influences of Continuance Intention and Past Behavior on Active Users' Knowledge Sharing Continuance and Frequency: Naver Knowledge-iN case (지속의도와 과거행위가 핵심 사용자의 지식공유 지속여부 및 빈도에 미치는 효과: 네이버 지식인 사례)

  • Kang, Minhyung
    • Knowledge Management Research
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    • v.21 no.3
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    • pp.67-87
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    • 2020
  • Maintaining active users who repeatedly share high-quality knowledge is critical for the success of online Q&A sites. This study suggests two paths that lead to active users' continuous knowledge sharing: 1) elaborated decision process, represented by continuance intention, and 2) automated cognitive process, represented by past behavior. The direct and moderating effects of continuance intention and past behavior were verified by analyzing subjective intention data and objective behavior data of 333 active users of Naver Knowledge-iN. Using Cox proportional hazards regression and negative binomial regression, the influences of continuance intention and past behavior on two types of continuous knowledge sharing were examined. The results showed that only past behavior was significantly influential on knowledge sharing continuance and as to the frequency of knowledge sharing, both continuance intention and past behavior's influences were significant. It was also confirmed that past behavior negatively moderates continuance intention's effect on the frequency of knowledge sharing. In order to maintain active users' continuous knowledge sharing, it is important to habituate knowledge sharing through repetitive knowledge sharing behavior. And in order to increase the frequency of knowledge sharing, in addition to the habituation, appropriate benefits that can increase the continuance intention should be provided.

A Study on the Development of Internet-based Reference Request System (인터넷 기반 참고질의시스템의 개발에 관한 연구)

  • 박준식;방대욱
    • Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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    • v.32 no.1
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    • pp.1-31
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    • 2001
  • University libraries need the development of a common Internet-based reference request system in order to prevent duplicated investment and provide interoperability among them. This paper proposes a standard of Internet-based reference recluest system that serves reference request-responses and that provides reference source sites on the world wide web. Using this system, university libraries can cooperate other libraries with reference databases and may perform tasks of reference service efficiently.

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Relationships between Collective Intelligence Quality, Its Determinants, and Usefulness: A Comparative Study between Wiki Service and Q&A Service in Perspective of Korean Users (집단지성의 품질, 그 결정요인, 유용성의 관계: 수용자 관점에서 한국의 위키서비스와 Q&A 서비스의 비교)

  • Joo, Jaehun;Normatov, Ismatilla R.
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.22 no.4
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    • pp.75-99
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    • 2012
  • Innovation can come from inside or outside organizations. Recently, organizations have begun turning to external knowledge more often, through various forms of collective intelligence (CI) as collaborative platform to solve complex problems. Several factors facilitate this CI utilization phenomenon. First, with the rapid development of Internet and social media, numerous web applications have become available to millions of the Internet users over the past few decades. Web 2.0 and social media have become innovative web applications that provide an environment for human social interaction and collaboration. Second, the diffusion of simple and easy-to-use technologies that enable users to interact and design web applications without programming skills have led to vast, previously unknown amounts of user-generated content. Finally, the Internet has enabled communities to connect and collaborate, creating a virtual world of CI. In this study, web enabled CI is defined as a composed ability of individuals who are acting as a single cognitive unit to achieve common goals, think reasonably, solve problems, make decisions, carry out complex tasks, and develop creative ideas collectively through participation and collaboration on the web. Although CI plays a critical role in organizational innovation and collaboration, the dubious quality of CI is still problem that is difficult to solve. In general, the quality level of content collected from the crowd is lower than that from professionals. Thus, it is important to identify determinants of CI quality and to analyze the relationship between CI quality and its usefulness. However, there is a lack of empirical study on the quality factors of web-enabled CI. There exist a variety of web enabled CI sites such as Threadless, iStockphoto or InnoCentive, Wikipedia, and Youtube. One of the most successful forms of web-enabled CI is the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, accessible all over the world. Another one example is Naver KnowledgeiN, a typical and popular CI site offering question and answer (Q&A) services. It is necessary to study whether or not different types of CI have a different effect on CI quality and its usefulness. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to answer to following research questions: ${\bullet}$ What determinants are important to CI quality? ${\bullet}$ What is the relationship between CI quality factors and the usefulness of web-enabled CI? ${\bullet}$ Does CI type have a moderating effect on the relationship between CI quality, its determinants, and CI usefulness? Online survey using Google Docs with email and Kakao Talk was conducted for collecting data from Wikipedia and Naver KnowledgeiN users. A totoal of 490 valid responses were collected, where users of Wikipedia were 220 while users of Naver KnowledgeiN were 270. Expertise of contributors, community size, and diversity of contributors were identified as core determinants of perceived CI quality. Perceived CI quality has significantly influenced perceived CI usefulness from a user's perspective. For improving CI quality, it is believed that organizations should ensure proper crowd size, facilitate CI contributors' diversity and attract as many expert contributors as possible. Hypotheses that CI type plays a role of moderator were partially supported. First, the relationship between expertise of contributors and perceived CI quality was different according to CI type. The expertise of contributors played a more important role in CI quality in the case of Q&A services such as Knowledge iN compared to wiki services such as Wikipedia. This implies that Q&A service requires more expertise and experiences in particular areas rather than the case of Wiki service to improve service quality. Second, the relationship between community size and perceived CI quality was different according to CI type. The community size has a greater effect on CI quality in case of Wiki service than that of Q&A service. The number of contributors in Wikipeda is important because Wiki is an encyclopedia service which is edited and revised repeatedly from many contributors while the answer given in Naver Knowledge iN can not be corrected by others. Finally, CI quality has a greater effect on its usefulness in case of Wiki service rather than Q&A service. In this paper, we suggested implications for practitioners and theorists. Organizations offering services based on collective intelligence try to improve expertise of contributeros, to increase the number of contributors, and to facilitate participation of various contributors.

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