Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites

  • Authors:

  • F. Maxwell Harper;Daphne Raban;Sheizaf Rafaeli;Joseph A. Konstan

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA;University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel;University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel;University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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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.