Is It good to be like wikipedia?: Exploring the trade-offs of introducing collaborative editing model to QandA Sites

Guo Li; Haiyi Zhu; Tun Lu; Xianghua Ding; Ning Gu

doi:10.1145/2675133.2675155

Is It good to be like wikipedia? Exploring the trade-offs of introducing collaborative editing model to QandA Sites

Guo Li, Haiyi Zhu, Tun Lu, Xianghua Ding, Ning Gu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

42 Scopus citations

Abstract

Online question and answer (Q&A) sites, which are platforms for users to post and answer questions on a wide range of topics, are becoming large repositories of valuable knowledge and important to societies. In order to sustain success, Q&A sites face the challenges of ensuring content quality and encouraging user contributions. This paper examines a particular design decision in Q&A sites-allowing Wikipedia-like collaborative editing on questions and answers, and explores its beneficial effects on content quality and potential detrimental effects on users' contributions. By examining five years' archival data of Stack Overflow, we found that the benefits of collaborative editing outweigh its risks. For example, each substantive edit from other users can increase the number of positive votes by 181% for the questions and 119% for the answers. On the other hand, each edit only decreases askers and answerers' subsequent contributions by no more than 5%. This work has implications for understanding and designing large-scale social computing systems.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages	1080-1091
Number of pages	12
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450329224
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675155
State	Published - Feb 28 2015
Externally published	Yes
Event	18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015 - BC, Canada Duration: Mar 14 2015 → Mar 18 2015

Publication series

Name	CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Other

Other	18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015
Country/Territory	Canada
City	BC
Period	3/14/15 → 3/18/15

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grants No.61272533, No.61332008, No.61300201

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 ACM.

Keywords

Collaborative Editing
QandA Systems
Social Computing System Design
Stack Overflow

Publisher link

10.1145/2675133.2675155

Find It

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Cite this

Li, G., Zhu, H., Lu, T., Ding, X., & Gu, N. (2015). Is It good to be like wikipedia? Exploring the trade-offs of introducing collaborative editing model to QandA Sites. In CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 1080-1091). (CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing). Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675155

Is It good to be like wikipedia? Exploring the trade-offs of introducing collaborative editing model to QandA Sites. / Li, Guo; Zhu, Haiyi; Lu, Tun et al.
CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2015. p. 1080-1091 (CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Li, G, Zhu, H, Lu, T, Ding, X & Gu, N 2015, Is It good to be like wikipedia? Exploring the trade-offs of introducing collaborative editing model to QandA Sites. in CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, pp. 1080-1091, 18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015, BC, Canada, 3/14/15. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675155

Li G, Zhu H, Lu T, Ding X, Gu N. Is It good to be like wikipedia? Exploring the trade-offs of introducing collaborative editing model to QandA Sites. In CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. 2015. p. 1080-1091. (CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing). doi: 10.1145/2675133.2675155

Li, Guo ; Zhu, Haiyi ; Lu, Tun et al. / Is It good to be like wikipedia? Exploring the trade-offs of introducing collaborative editing model to QandA Sites. CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2015. pp. 1080-1091 (CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing).

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