Analysis of Question and Answering Behavior in Question Routing Services

With the development of Web 2.0 technologies, social question and answering has become an important venue for individuals to seek for information that are important to their everyday lives. While prior literatures studying social question answering have suggested the possibility of routing questions to potential answerers for assistance, still little is known about how effective these question routing services are, and how individuals behave within such collaborative question answering environments. With the aim to advance the present knowledge about collaborative question answering that happens on social networking sites, in this study we collected questions and answers posted on Wenwo, a Chinese question routing service based on microblogging sites, over a ten-month period. We conduct various analyses to study individual’s question and answering behavior from multifaceted perspectives, including the contributors effort in providing helps to others, the questioner’s and the answerer’s topical interests, and their connectedness with others through the question answering processes. Our results revealed the effectiveness of Wenwo in routing social Q&A questions to potential answerers and, in the meanwhile indicated the possible bottlenecks exist in the design of the current question routing services.