Abstract
Based on various factors such as experience, interest, and motivation, users in any system choose to perform certain activities more than the others. In this study, we investigate a similar behavior and its dynamics in the websites of StackExchange. We find that most of the users in these websites tend to contribute predominantly to one of the activities available on these websites. Such a behavior yields a high-level distribution of users across the activities, referred to as User-distribution. We find that this distribution varies for different websites of StackExchange. We also observe that the users contributing to different activities trigger each other to provide more contribution. Using these insights, we build a model that explains the effect of change in user-distribution on the amount of knowledge produced on these websites. The model shows that one can formulate an optimal ecosystem by motivating the right kind of users, which leads to the maximum fostering of knowledge on these websites.
A preliminary version of this work reporting the activity-selection behavior of users is published here [7].
J. S. Saini—The author contributed while he was a student at Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adamic, L.A., Zhang, J., Bakshy, E., Ackerman, M.S.: Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 665–674. ACM (2008)
Agrawal, R., Rajagopalan, S., Srikant, R., Xu, Y.: Mining newsgroups using networks arising from social behavior. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 529–535. ACM (2003)
Arazy, O., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Nov, O., Daxenberger, J., Balestra, M., Cheshire, C.: On the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of emergent role behaviors in Wikipedia. In: Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, vol. 35 (2017)
Chhabra, A., Iyengar, S.S.: Characterizing the triggering phenomenon in Wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, p. 11. ACM (2018)
Chhabra, A., Iyengar, S.: How does knowledge come by? arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.06946 (2017)
Chhabra, A., Iyengar, S., Saini, P., Bhat, R.S.: Presence of an ecosystem: a catalyst in the knowledge building process in crowdsourced annotation environments. In: Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2015) (2015)
Chhabra, A., RS Iyengar, S.: Activity-selection behavior of users in StackExchange websites. In: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020, pp. 105–106 (2020)
Furtado, A., Andrade, N., Oliveira, N., Brasileiro, F.: Contributor profiles, their dynamics, and their importance in five q&a sites. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 1237–1252. ACM (2013)
Golder, S.A., Donath, J.: Social roles in electronic communities. Internet Res. 5, 19–22 (2004)
He, J., Tan, A.H., Tan, C.L., Sung, S.Y.: On quantitative evaluation of clustering systems. In: Wu, W., Xiong, H., Shekhar, S. (eds.) Clustering and Information Retrieval. Network Theory and Applications, vol. 11, pp. 105–133. Springer, Boston (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0227-8_4
Iacopini, I., Milojević, S., Latora, V.: Network dynamics of innovation processes. Phys. Rev. Lett. 120(4), 048301 (2018)
Liu, J., Ram, S.: Who does what: collaboration patterns in the Wikipedia and their impact on article quality. ACM Trans. Manag. Inf. Syst. (TMIS) 2(2), 11 (2011)
Marengo, L., Zeppini, P.: The arrival of the new. J. Evol. Econ. 26(1), 171–194 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-015-0438-0
Rezgui, A., Crowston, K.: Stigmergic coordination in Wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, p. 19. ACM (2018)
Tausczik, Y.R., Pennebaker, J.W.: Participation in an online mathematics community: differentiating motivations to add. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 207–216. ACM (2012)
Tria, F., Loreto, V., Servedio, V.D.P., Strogatz, S.H.: The dynamics of correlated novelties. Sci. Rep. 4, 5890 (2014)
Welser, H.T., Gleave, E., Fisher, D., Smith, M.: Visualizing the signatures of social roles in online discussion groups. J. Soc. Struct. 8(2), 1–32 (2007)
Yang, J., Tao, K., Bozzon, A., Houben, G.-J.: Sparrows and owls: characterisation of expert behaviour in StackOverflow. In: Dimitrova, V., Kuflik, T., Chin, D., Ricci, F., Dolog, P., Houben, G.-J. (eds.) UMAP 2014. LNCS, vol. 8538, pp. 266–277. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08786-3_23
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by WOS-A, Department of Science and Technology, India [SR/WOS-A/ET-1058/2014] and CSRI, Department of Science and Technology, India [SR/CSRI/344/2016].
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chhabra, A., Iyengar, S.R.S., Saini, J.S., Malik, V. (2020). Activity-selection Behavior and Optimal User-distribution in Q&A Websites. In: Nguyen, N.T., Hoang, B.H., Huynh, C.P., Hwang, D., Trawiński, B., Vossen, G. (eds) Computational Collective Intelligence. ICCCI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63007-2_67
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63007-2_67
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-63006-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-63007-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)