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Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something

Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something WWW 2008 / Refereed Track: Social Networks & Web 2.0 - Analysis of Social Networks & Online Interaction Knowledge Sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone Knows Something Lada A. Adamic1 , Jun Zhang1 , Eytan Bakshy1 , Mark S. Ackerman1,2 {ladamic,junzh,ebakshy,ackerm}@umich.edu ABSTRACT Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one ™s curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA ™s knowledge sharing activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we nd that some users focus narrowly on speci c topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users ™ interests. We nd that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something

Association for Computing Machinery — Apr 21, 2008

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References (26)

Datasource
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by ACM Inc.
ISBN
978-1-60558-085-2
doi
10.1145/1367497.1367587
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

WWW 2008 / Refereed Track: Social Networks & Web 2.0 - Analysis of Social Networks & Online Interaction Knowledge Sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone Knows Something Lada A. Adamic1 , Jun Zhang1 , Eytan Bakshy1 , Mark S. Ackerman1,2 {ladamic,junzh,ebakshy,ackerm}@umich.edu ABSTRACT Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one ™s curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA ™s knowledge sharing activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we nd that some users focus narrowly on speci c topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users ™ interests. We nd that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after.

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