Open Access“How much change do you get from 40$?” – Analyzing and addressing failed questions on social Q&A
Author(s) -
Shah Chirag,
Radford Marie L.,
Connaway Lynn Silipigni,
Choi Erik,
Kitzie Vanessa
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.14504901119
Subject(s) - typology , seekers , service (business) , internet privacy , social media , computer science , psychology , public relations , social psychology , sociology , world wide web , political science , business , marketing , law , anthropology
Online question‐answering (Q&A) services are becoming increasingly popular among information seekers. While online Q&A services encompass both virtual reference service (VRS) and social Q&A (SQA), SQA services, such as Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers, have experienced more success in reaching out to the masses and leveraging subsequent participation. However, the large volume of content on some of the more popular SQA sites renders participants unable to answer some posted questions adequately or even at all. To reduce this latter category of questions that do not receive an answer, the current paper explores reasons for why fact‐based questions fail on a specific Q&A service. For this exploration and analyses, thousands of failed questions were collected from Yahoo! Answers extracting only those that were fact‐based, information‐seeking questions, while opinion/advice‐seeking questions were discarded. A typology was then created to code reasons of failures for these questions using a grounded theory approach. Using this typology, suggestions are proposed for how the questions could be restructured or redirected to another Q&A service (possibly a VRS), so users would have a better chance of receiving an answer.