Whither the Experts? Social Affordances and the Cultivation of Experts in Community Q&A Systems

  • Authors:
  • Howard T. Welser;Eric Gleave;Vladimir Barash;Marc Smith;Jessica Meckes

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • CSE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Volume 04
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Community based Question and Answer systems have been promoted as web 2.0 solutions to the problem of finding expert knowledge.This promise depends on systems’ capacity to attract and sustain experts capable of offering high quality, factual answers.Content analysis of dedicated contributors’ messages in the Live QnA system found: (1) few contributors who focused on providing technical answers (2) a preponderance of attention paid to opinion and discussion, especially in non-technical threads.This paucity of experts raises an important general question:how do the social affordances of a site alter the ecology of roles found there?Using insights from recent research in online community, we generate a series of expectations about how social affordances are likely to alter the role ecology of online systems.