A case study of contributor behavior in Q&A site and tags: the importance of prominent profiles in community productivity

摘要

Background Question-and-answer (Q&A) sites have shown to be a valuable resource for helping people to solve their everyday problems. These sites currently enable a large number of contributors to exchange expertise by different ways (creating questions, answers or comments, and voting in these), and it is noticeable that they contribute in diverse amounts and create content of varying quality. Methods Concerned with diversity of behaviors, this paper advances present knowledge about Q&A sites by performing a cluster analysis with a multifaceted view of contributors that account for their motivations and abilities to identify the most common behavioral profiles in these sites. Results By examining all contributors’ activity from a large site named Super User, we unveil nine behavioral profiles that group users according to the quality and quantity of their contributions. Based on these profiles, we analyze the community composition and the importance of each profile in the site’s productivity. Moreover, we also investigate seven tag communities from Super User aiming to experiment with the generality of our results. In this context, the same nine profiles were found, and it was also observed that there is a remarkable similarity between the composition and productivity of the communities defined by the seven tags and the site itself. Conclusions The profiles uncovered enhance the overall understanding of how Q&A sites work and knowing these profiles can support the site’s management. Furthermore, an analysis of particularities in the tag communities comparison relates the variation in behavior to the typical behavior of each tag community studied, what also draws implications for creating administrative strategies.