Specialists and Synthesists in a Question Answering Community

The most sustainable online communities are those that allow and encourage their users to have a voice in how the community evolves. The proliferation of online communities with collaborative filtering mechanisms, where user feedback is aggregated to shape future interactions, makes it necessary to understand why participants in online communities value the content they do. Building on the concepts of users as specialists and synthesists developed in previous research, this study examines Answerbag, an online question answering community where users rate one another’s answers to provide collaborative filtering. In this environment, specialists are operationalized as those who claim expertise in a given topic and answer questions without referencing other sources, and synthesists as those who include one or more references to external sources in their answers. The results of the study suggest that within the Answerbag community as a whole, the answers of synthesists tended to be rated more highly than those of specialists, though answers provided by specialists were rated more highly within certain categories. The consequences of differences in the perceived value of information provided by specialists and synthesists are examined, and avenues for future research are discussed

Search delegation, synthesists and expertise on social media

Background. Social media often adds a layer of intermediation between sources and information consumer, with users outsourcing some of the information work to others. Social media “synthesists” have been identified as a group of volunteer information providers fulfilling this role.Approach. Through a review of evidence from philosophy, information science and knowledge management, this paper explores the implications of cognitive outsourcing, presents quality standards for synthesis and asks how well synthesists meet these. In the process, the role of intermediary is discussed, along with the non-specialist status of the synthesist.Results. Findings show that social media synthesists fulfil a useful role and that their importance in terms of knowledge translation is clear. While their synthesis quality may fall far short of LIS standards, there are a number of ways that some quality issues can be addressed, including the involvement of the information profession itself on the same social platforms.Contribution. Through a comparison of synthesis best practice with current informal information behaviour on social media, the paper draws attention to quality issues and new opportunities to address them. This represents an attempt to identify ways to bridge formal and emerging, informal information markets

Answer Reliability on Q&A Sites

Similar to other Web 2.0 platforms, user-created content on question answering (Q&A) sites raises concerns about information quality. However, it is possible that some of these sites provide accurate information while others do not. This paper evaluates and compares answer reliability on four Q&A sites. Content analysis of 1,522 transactions from Yahoo! Answers, Wiki Answers, Askville, and the Wikipedia Reference Desk, reveals significant differences in answer quality among these sites. The most popular Q&A site (that attracts the largest numbers of users, questions, and answers) provides the least accurate, complete, and verifiable information

Designing Social Question-and-Answering Interaction Using Goal-Directed Design Method

A social question-and-answering (social Q&A) site is an online community where users can ask and answer questions to share their knowledge and all data are publicly accessible. The platform has caught its users’ attention and given them a new way in getting information from other users. However, the growth of social Q&A sites is still followed by some problems faced by its users. This study aims to develop an interaction design of social Q&A using goal-directed design (GDD) method. Compared to User-Centered Design method, the GDD has more specific process. The process accomplished in the development includes four phases: research, modeling, requirement definition, and framework definition. The research phase was done by conducting literature review and potential user interview. The modeling phase was carried out to explore behavior patterns, and combine them into user model. The requirement definition was conducted to determine product functionality and design. In this phase, user scenarios that describe how a persona uses the product were developed. The framework definition phase focused on an interaction framework which was conducted through six steps. The series of phases resulted in personas, scenarios, requirements, and wireframes of the product. Social Q&A product developed in the study is one that is specialized for asking and sharing information about studying abroad. The design was developed in the form of product wireframes and key path scenarios along with storyboards that describe interaction in the product. Key path scenarios were constructed based on tasks personas could perform in the product. Further works include developing visual design framework and conducting usability testing of the design to potential users

A machine learning-based approach to predicting success of questions on social question-answering

While social question-answering (SQA) services are becoming increasingly popular, there is often an issue of unsatisfactory or missing information for a question posed by an information seeker. This study creates a model to predict question failure, or a question that does not receive an answer, within the social Q&A site Yahoo! Answers. To do so, observed shared characteristics of failed questions were translated into empirical features, both textual and non-textual in nature, and measured using machine extraction methods. A classifier was then trained using these features and tested on a data set of 400 questions – half of them successful, half not – to determine the accuracy of the classifier in identifying failed questions. The results show the substantial ability of the approach to correctly identify the likelihood of success or failure of a question, resulting in a promising tool to automatically identify ill-formed questions and/or questions that are likely to fail and make suggestions on how to revise them.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Collective Intelligence - Consenting to Conscient Consultation

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Disney, Uber, Tinder, etc.: ours is the generation that has got a World Wide Web to their fingertips; in addition, we often feel like the net has analogously become a kind of add-on to our minds, i.e., an extension to our intellectual capacity. Browsing on the internet, emailing, skyping, googling, chatting, posting texts, photos or videos on social media, whilst interacting with contents that can be as informative as the news broadcast and as entertaining as playing videogames or streaming music, films, and series via applications (apps) downloaded on smart devices have thus been gradually becoming some of our generation’s daily activities of choice. Along these lines, whilst meaning to conceptualise a method for studying an alternative to our present-day prescriptive educational practices, I elaborate a constructivist approach towards the transformative paradigm of a transmedia-interactive produsage. That is, in this MA Thesis I propose the produsage of a cyclic program in which educators could cooperatively consent on a conscient consultation of their prodused contents in a knowledge democratisation exercise. These experts could thereby participate on the mediation, moderation, and mediatisation of a (n)ethnographic e-volution on the road to a sociocultural empowerment and a civic emancipation movement, striving for critical reforms that would pursue the autonomous automatisation of self-regulatory socio-cultures. Comparatively, from this study’s standpoint, the arguably participative factor of the existing Participatory Web resembles the speculative political empowerment triggered by the act of voting for a political candidate: because, in both cases, the options presented to the public regularly are pre-established by the few de facto empowered decision-makers, like e.g., the heads of political parties and coalitions on one hand, or content writers and producers on another. Alternatively, in this thesis I will look into concealed alternatives for (or, preferably, against) what has gradually developed into the modus operandi of media and technology businesses: the monetisation of information by the commodification of produsers. More specifically, I hope to analyse if, inasmuch as ICTs have been democratising knowledge, they also have been contributing to the prospective quest for more maximalist, and collective, forms of participation during our (Western societies’) history. Notwithstanding, this thesis is a theoretical study, and therefore, here I will not present an empirical example of such educative interaction: which I deliberately call eduraction. Appropriately, because the academia continuously gains new insights with the intersection and compilation of our human cognition, – viz., with our collective intelligence (CI) – I understand that constructivist edutainment and pedagogical participation practices can be interchangeably employed towards a civic engagement – as presented in this thesis’ results. Accordingly, the discussion that I intend to incite with this research theoretically refers to the possible implementation of artefacts for mediatising our civic participation, towards the radical sense of democracy via a critical constructivist education. In short, here, I aim to explain how interactive media create collective intelligence, by analysing what decentralisation of power is engendered by produsage and why edutaining praxis ought to spur a civic participation. As a result, in this study I will hypothesise the emergence of a 21st century conscientisation praxis. All in all, educators are enthusiasts, connoisseurs, collecting, curating, collaborating, criticising, converging, and creating contents that synthesise and might materialise meaningful methods and manners for systematically reasoning, negotiating, or promoting a collective, constructivist, and perchance transformative and participative (democratic) utopia. Ultimately, instructors are a medium of knowledge; and be that as it may, nobody knows all, but the sum of all known by each of us is all the knowledge of our multi-millenary humanity. Thence, we ought to find ways of collaboratively connecting the dots with our bits and pieces of information. Until very recently, many considered the efforts for conceptualising networks, in which meaningful thematics could be broadly discussed (by people from different ethnicities all over the world), just as naïve as utopic. Indeed, it is still debatable whether interactive media, in the current state of Web 2.0, do provide such effectual possibilities to its users. On the other hand, it is with the purpose of adding to this debate that I endeavour to investigate quiescent means for collaboratively working on a critical upgrade to the denotation of democracy. As a matter of fact, technology, etymologically, is the study of crafts; and this MA Thesis endeavours to deal with the sociocultural factors and artefacts that we create to assist our kind’s evolving signification of civilisation. With this in mind, for concluding this thesis with a theorisation on yet untapped possibilities within produsage, I look into some of the latest media developments which could possibly contribute to meaningful improvements on our practices of participative citizenship. Then, in such hyperlinked hypothesis, educative matters of various thematic universes could be cooperatively taught by doyens, through networked lectures, with new hypertexts being added to the storylines of their lessons inasmuch as they were being produced and curated, as a critique to divergent interpretations on those phenomena previously presented via a unique interactive-video production. In that event, interactive media could create a Collective Intelligence, by means of an edutaining praxis which could spur a civic participation for democratising knowledge via produsage – in turn, (re-)creating and cyclically transforming our collective intelligence. Like this, such media type would theoretically serve as a wikinomical platform

Can Social News Websites Pay for Content and Curation? The SteemIt Cryptocurrency Model

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publishing in Journal of Information Science on 15/12/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551517748290 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.SteemIt is a Reddit-like social news site that pays members for posting and curating content. It uses micropayments backed by a tradeable currency, exploiting the Bitcoin cryptocurrency generation model to finance content provision in conjunction with advertising. If successful, this paradigm might change the way in which volunteer-based sites operate. This paper investigates 925,092 new members’ first posts for insights into what drives financial success in the site. Initial blog posts on average received $0.01, although the maximum accrued was$20,680.83. Longer, more sentiment-rich or more positive comments with personal information received the greatest financial reward in contrast to more informational or topical content. Thus, there is a clear financial value in starting with a friendly introduction rather than immediately attempting to provide useful content, despite the latter being the ultimate site goal. Follow-up posts also tended to be more successful when more personal, suggesting that interpersonal communication rather than quality content provision has driven the site so far. It remains to be seen whether the model of small typical rewards and the possibility that a post might generate substantially more are enough to incentivise long term participation or a greater focus on informational posts in the long term

Activity archetypes in question-and-answer (Q8A) websites—A study of 50 Stack Exchange instances

Millions of users on the Internet discuss a variety of topics on Question-and-Answer (Q&A) instances. However, not all instances and topics receive the same amount of attention, as some thrive and achieve self-sustaining levels of activity, while others fail to attract users and either never grow beyond being a small niche community or become inactive. Hence, it is imperative to not only better understand but also to distill deciding factors and rules that define and govern sustainable Q&A instances. We aim to empower community managers with quantitative methods for them to better understand, control and foster their communities, and thus contribute to making the Web a more efficient place to exchange information. To that end, we extract, model and cluster user activity-based time series from $50$ randomly selected Q&A instances from the Stack Exchange network to characterize user behavior. We find four distinct types of user activity temporal patterns, which vary primarily according to the users' activity frequency. Finally, by breaking down total activity in our 50 Q&A instances by the previously identified user activity profiles, we classify those 50 Q&A instances into three different activity profiles. Our parsimonious categorization of Q&A instances aligns with the stage of development and maturity of the underlying communities, and can potentially help operators of such instances: We not only quantitatively assess progress of Q&A instances, but we also derive practical implications for optimizing Q&A community building efforts, as we e.g. recommend which user types to focus on at different developmental stages of a Q&A community

FACTORS INFLUENCING USER’S CONTINUANCE INTENTION ON PAID QUESTION AND ANSWER SERVICE ----A STUDY ON WEIBO IN CHINA

This thesis addresses the research question “Why do users continue to use paid Q&A in China” by means showed below: First, this research introduces research background of paid Q&A in China and raises corresponding research question and highlights the research significance of this thesis topic; Second, the author concludes previous research on paid Q&A in aspects of Q&A system, paid subscription and sharing economy, and finds that most of prior research focuses on exploring the influence of usefulness but not enjoyment on the users’ willingness of continuing using a paid Q&A system; Third, the thesis introduces the VAM theory and build a modified model based on it, this modified model highlights the importance of pleasure on users’ continuance intention in using paid Q&A; Finally, the empirical study combining an Exploratory Factor Analysis and a Confirmatory Factor Analysis proves that, after integrating factors extracted from previous research and the proposed model, the research is tested to be explanatorily capable and hypotheses related to the model are mostly proved to be supported. As a conclusion, this study conducts an investigation on the constructs and related theories that influence users’ continuance intention to use paid Q&A, from a hedonic perspective. In this thesis, VAM theory is selected as the prototype of proposed research model which reveals factors affecting users’ continuance intention to use a Chinese paid Q&A product named Weibo Paid Q&A. In this thesis, the proposed model makes predictions that the constructs perceived fee and community atmosphere along with perceived enjoyment construct have critical effect on users’ continuance willingness in using Weibo Paid Q&A in China. With the assistance of PLS–SEM, this study analyzes data collected from users in WPQA, the empirical study verifies that users' continuance intention is assuredly dependent on perceived fee and community atmosphere along with perceived enjoyment. The study also reveals that quality of answerers and quality of answer positively exert significant influences on perceived enjoyment

The thinking styles of IT students and practitioners.

Thesis (M.Com)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.IT expenditures and organizational performance have been disconnected in the past due to an economic transition from an era of competitive advantage on information, to one based on knowledge creation. The earlier era was characterized by slow change that could not be interpreted by most formal information systems (Lubbe, 1997). IT managers therefore need to develop a greater appreciation of their intangible human assets such as knowledge and inquiring styles. In other words, an investigation into knowledge creation rather than Knowledge Management needs to be undertaken (Lundin et a/., 2000). According to IT managers, attention should be paid to the human aspects of knowledge creation in current formulations of IT enabled knowledge management (Lundin eta/., 2000). This research therefore provides guidelines in overcoming the challenges of miscommunication and misunderstanding of IT people in knowledge creation and management. This research is structured in such a way that students and professionals as well as marketers and IT personnel can use it. This study has been conducted at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Westville Campus), in the School of Information Systems and Technology. The population included all students studying Information Systems and Technology. The population for the Information Systems and Technology practitioners has been selected from the University of KwaZulu- Natal's School of Information Systems and Technology department