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Participation Differences in Q&A Sites Across Countries: Opportunities for Cultural Adaptation

Published: 23 October 2016 Publication History

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.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '16: Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
    October 2016
    1045 pages
    ISBN:9781450347631
    DOI:10.1145/2971485
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 23 October 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. Culture
    2. online communities
    3. question & answer sites

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    NordiCHI '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 58 of 231 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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    • (2022)Understanding Cultural Influence on Perspectives Around Contact Tracing StrategiesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555696:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Including Everyone, Everywhere: Understanding Opportunities and Challenges of Geographic Gender-Inclusion in OSSIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.309281348:9(3394-3409)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
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