Topics of example questions and discussion at the early stage of community building for health Q&A: A case study of health stack exchange

As one of the most significant examples of collective intelligence, online peer production communities, such as Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, have highly contributed to reshape the knowledge infrastructure on the Web. The current volume of peer production research is vast but empirical studies regarding the early stage of community building are in a very limited number. This empirical study, therefore, presents preliminary results of community building and user‐driven issues associated with a Health Q&A site at its early stage, namely the Definition stage by the Q&A system. The method of content analysis was used to identify 4 categories with 20 subcategories of example questions and 8 categories with 23 subcategories of community building discussion threads. The example questions have shown, that the development of Health Stack Exchange was driven by cognitive instead of social or emotional motivations and social supporting questions were not much welcomed by early‐stage community members. Findings also pointed to the importance of seeking consensus about the community's ultimate goal and target user group in the start‐up stage, which could help to solve the scope definition problems.