A Comparative Assessment of Answer Quality on Four Question Answering Sites

Shachaf, Pnina A Comparative Assessment of Answer Quality on Four Question Answering Sites. Journal of Information Science, 2011, vol. 20, n. 10, pp. 1-13. [Journal article (Paginated)]

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English abstract

Question answering (Q&A) sites, where communities of volunteers answer questions, may provide faster, cheaper, and better services than traditional institutions. However, like other Web 2.0 platforms, user-created content raises concerns about information quality. At the same time, Q&A sites may provide answers of different quality because they have different communities and technological platforms. This paper compares answer quality on four Q&A sites: Askville, WikiAnswers, Wikipedia Reference Desk, and Yahoo! Answers. Findings indicate that: 1) the use of similar collaborative processes on these sites results in a wide range of outcomes. Significant differences in answer accuracy, completeness, and verifiability were found; 2) answer multiplication does not always result in better information. Answer multiplication yields more complete and verifiable answers but does not result in higher accuracy levels; and 3) a Q&A site’s popularity does not correlate with its answer quality, on all three measures.

Item type: Journal article (Paginated)
Keywords: Q&A Sites; Social Q&A; Community Question Answering; Social Reference; Information Quality; Crowd-sourcing
Subjects: A. Theoretical and general aspects of libraries and information. > AB. Information theory and library theory.
B. Information use and sociology of information > BA. Use and impact of information.
B. Information use and sociology of information > BC. Information in society.
B. Information use and sociology of information > BG. Information dissemination and diffusion.
H. Information sources, supports, channels. > HI. Electronic Media.
H. Information sources, supports, channels. > HL. Databases and database Networking.
H. Information sources, supports, channels. > HQ. Web pages.
I. Information treatment for information services > ID. Knowledge representation.
I. Information treatment for information services > IJ. Reference work.
L. Information technology and library technology > LC. Internet, including WWW.
L. Information technology and library technology > LZ. None of these, but in this section.
Depositing user: Amanda Ferrara
Date deposited: 07 Oct 2013 15:34
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:28
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/20328

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