Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge
Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge
Who will you ask? An empirical study of interpersonal task information seeking
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Social Q&A and virtual reference—comparing apples and oranges with the help of experts and users
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
The structure of argument patterns on a social Q&A site
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
How many answers are enough? optimal number of answers for Q&A sites
SocInfo'12 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Social Informatics
Strategies for justifying counter-arguments in Q&A discussion
Journal of Information Science
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An increasing number of students are seeking homework help outside library structures and systems, such as on social reference sites, where questions are answered by online community members who rate one another's answers and provide collaborative filtering in place of traditional expertise. This paper reports the preliminary results of a participant observation and content analysis of homework questions submitted to Answerbag, a social reference site with over one million unique visitors per month. The results suggest that members of the online community are able to distinguish between questions submitted by Seekers--those who interact with the community and engage in conversation about their questions--and Sloths, those who post their homework questions apparently verbatim and interact no further. How the community reacts to these distinct types of questioners reflects values similar to those of professional reference providers, and the community structure also allows members to educate questioners about community standards and the ethics of information seeking.