Nigini Oliveira
Nazareno Andrade
ABSTRACT
While the success of online Question & Answer (Q&A) sites relies on user contributions, previous work has shown that the number of contributions varies between countries. What remains unknown is whether this is due to a few people contributing a lot, or whether highly represented countries have a higher percentage of users who are willing to contribute. In this paper, we investigate this question with the goal of identifying opportunities to equalize contributions between countries. Analyzing the data from StackOverflow and Superuser, two popular Q&A sites, we find that the percentage of contributing users significantly varies between 116 countries, and that these differences can be partly explained by a country's national culture and overall English proficiency. We discuss how specific design decisions on these sites, such as the competitive reward mechanism used to encourage contributions, could be changed to encourage currently passive people to contribute.
- Aaker, J., and Maheswaran, D. The Effect of Cultural Orientation on Persuasion. Journal of Consumer Research 24 (1997), 315--328.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Ackerman, M. S., Dachtera, J., Pipek, V., and Wulf, V. Sharing Knowledge and Expertise: The CSCW View of Knowledge Management. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 22, 4--6 (2013), 531--573. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Adamic, L. A., Zhang, J., Bakshy, E., and Ackerman, M. S. Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something. WWW '08, ACM (2008), 665--674. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ardichvili, A., Maurer, M., Li, W., Wentling, T., and Stuedemann, R. Cultural influences on knowledge sharing through online communities of practice. Journal of Knowledge Management 10, 1 (2006).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cohen, J. Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (2nd Edition), 2 ed. Routledge, July 1988.Google Scholar
- Dahl, S. Intercultural Research: The Current State of Knowledge. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series (Feb. 2005).Google Scholar
- English First. EF English Proficiency Index Report, 2014. http://www.ef.edu/epi/.Google Scholar
- Fugelstad, P., Dwyer, P., Moses, J. F., Kim, J., Mannino, C. A., Terveen, L., and Snyder, M. What Makes Users Rate (Share, Tag, Edit...)?: Predicting Patterns of Participation in Online Communities. CSCW '12 (2012), 969--978. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Furtado, A., Andrade, N., Oliveira, N., and Brasileiro, F. Contributor Profiles, Their Dynamics, and Their Importance in Five Q&A Sites. CSCW '13 (2013), 1237--1252. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gallagher, S. E., and Savage, T. Cross-cultural analysis in online community research: A literature review. Computers in Human Behavior 29, 3 (May 2013), 1028--1038. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gao, G., Yamashita, N., Hautasaari, A. M., and Fussell, S. R. Improving multilingual collaboration by displaying how non-native speakers use automated transcripts and bilingual dictionaries. CHI '15 (2015). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Garcia-Gavilanes, R., Quercia, D., and Jaimes, A. Cultural Dimensions in Twitter: Time, Individualism and Power. ICWSM '13 (2013).Google Scholar
- Hara, N., Shachaf, P., and Hew, K. F. Cross-cultural analysis of the Wikipedia community. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61, 10 (Oct. 2010), 2097--2108. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., and Minkov, M. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition, 3 ed. McGraw-Hill, May 2010.Google Scholar
- Inglehart, R., and Baker, W. E. Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values. American Sociological Review 65, 1 (2000), 19--51.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Inglehart, R., and Oyserman, D. Individualism, Autonomy and Self-Expression: The Human Development Syndrome. In Comparing Cultures, Dimensions of Culture in a Comparative Perspective, H. Vinken, J. Soeters, and P. Ester, Eds. Brill Academic Pub, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2004, 74--96.Google Scholar
- Karahanna, E., Evaristo, J. R., and Srite, M. Levels of culture and individual behavior: An integrative perspective. Advanced Topics in Global Information Management, Volume 5 (2006), 30.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kayes, I., Kourtellis, N., Quercia, D., Iamnitchi, A., and Bonchi, F. Cultures in Community Question Answering. ACM HT'15 (2015). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Khaled, R., Barr, P., Biddle, R., Fischer, R., and Noble, J. Game Design Strategies for Collectivist Persuasion. Sandbox '09 (2009). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kraut, R. E., and Resnick, P. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. The MIT Press, Mar. 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Li, J. H., Chang, X. R., Lin, L., and Ma, L. Y. Meta-analytic comparison on the influencing factors of knowledge transfer in different cultural contexts. Journal of Knowledge Management 18, 2 (2014), 278--306.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mamykina, L., Manoim, B., Mittal, M., Hripcsak, G., and Hartmann, B. Design lessons from the fastest Q&A site in the west. CHI '11 (2011), 2857--2866. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mann, L., Radford, M., Burnett, P., Ford, S., Bond, M., Leung, K., Nakamura, H., Vaughan, G., and Yang, K.-S. Cross-cultural differences in self-reported decision-making style and confidence. International Journal of Psychology 33, 5 (1998), 325--335.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Marcus, A., and Gould, E. W. Crosscurrents: Cultural Dimensions and Global Web User-interface Design. Interactions 7, 4 (July 2000), 32--46. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Matsumoto, D., and Yoo, S. H. Toward a New Generation of Cross-Cultural Research. Perspectives on Psychological Science 1, 3 (Sept. 2006), 234--250.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Minkov, M., and Hofstede, G. Is National Culture a Meaningful Concept? Cross-Cultural Research 46, 2 (May 2012), 133--159.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nam, K. K., Ackerman, M. S., and Adamic, L. A. Questions in, knowledge in?: a study of naver's question answering community. CHI '09 (2009), 779--788. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pal, A., Chang, S., and Konstan, J. A. Evolution of Experts in Question Answering Communities. ICWSM '13 (2012).Google Scholar
- Pfeil, U., Zaphiris, P., and Ang, C. S. Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, 1 (Oct. 2006).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Quattrone, G., Mashhadi, A., and Capra, L. Mind the Map: The Impact of Culture and Economic Affluence on Crowd-mapping Behaviours. CSCW '14 (2014), 934--944. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reinecke, K., Nguyen, M. K., Bernstein, A., Näf, M., and Gajos, K. Z. Doodle around the world: online scheduling behavior reflects cultural differences in time perception and group decision-making. CSCW '13 (2013), 45--54. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schenk, D., and Lungu, M. Geo-locating the Knowledge Transfer in StackOverflow. SSE 2013 (2013). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wikipedia. List of countries by english-speaking population, 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population Accessed 2015-12-07.Google Scholar
- World Bank. World bank indicators, 2011. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator.Google Scholar
- Yang, J., Morris, M. R., Teevan, J., Adamic, L. A., and Ackerman, M. S. Culture matters: A survey study of social Q&A behavior. ICWSM '11 (2011).Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Participation Differences in Q&A Sites Across Countries: Opportunities for Cultural Adaptation
Recommendations
Using narratives as tools for channeling participation in online communities
Community members with high sense of community are more likely to use narratives.Members who use and share narratives have higher participation levels.Narratives are useful tools to build cohesive cultures and increase participation.We propose online ...
Cultural differences across governmental website design
ICIC '12: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Intercultural CollaborationIn this paper, we study the relevance of Hall and Hofstede's works to the web design beyond traditional domain areas like e-commerce, and advertising. Existing theories explain how design may be affected by cultural differences, and we explore how those ...
How peer photos influence member participation in online communities
CHI EA '05: CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsOnline communities (OLCs) are gatherings of like-minded people, brought together in cyberspace by shared interests. Creating such communities is not a big challenge; sustaining members' participation is. In this paper, we describe a technique for ...
Comments