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How Many Answers Are Enough? Optimal Number of Answers for Q&A Sites

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 7710))

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Abstract

With the proliferation of the social web questions about information quality and optimization attract the attention of IS scholars. Question-answering (QA) sites, such as Yahoo!Answers, have the potential to produce good answers, but at the same time not all answers are good and not all QA sites are alike. When organizations design and plan for the integration of question answering services on their sites, identification of good answers and process optimization become critical. Arguing that ‘given enough answers all questions are answered successfully,’ this paper identifies the optimal number of posts that generate high quality answers. Based on content analysis of Yahoo! Answers’ informational questions (n=174) and their answers (n=1,023), the study found that seven answers per question are ‘enough’ to provide a good answer.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    Pnina Fichman

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  1. Pnina Fichman
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (LSIR), School for Computer and Communication Science (I&C), EPFL-IC,, Bâtiment BC, Station 14, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Karl Aberer

  2. Department of Sociology, ICS, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Andreas Flache

  3. Groningen Center for Social Complexity Studies, Nettelbosje 2, 9747 AE, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Wander Jager

  4. Georgia Institute of Technology, KACB, room 3340,School of Computer Science, College of Computing, 266 Ferst Dr, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  5. Tsinghua University, Rm 1-308, FIT Building, 100084, Beijing, China

    Jie Tang

  6. Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), Anna van Saksenlaan 10, 2593 HT, Den Haag, The Netherlands

    Christophe Guéret

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Fichman, P. (2012). How Many Answers Are Enough? Optimal Number of Answers for Q&A Sites. In: Aberer, K., Flache, A., Jager, W., Liu, L., Tang, J., Guéret, C. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7710. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35386-4_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35386-4_20

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35385-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35386-4

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