Q&A software

Q&A Software is online software that attempts to answer questions asked by users (Q&A stands for "question and answer"). Q&A software is frequently integrated by large and specialist corporations and tends to be implemented as a community that allows users in similar fields to discuss questions and provide answers to common and specialist questions.

There are numerous examples of Q&A Software in both Open Source and SaaS formats, including Qhub, OSQA, Question2Answer and Stack Exchange. Standalone Q&A communities such as Quora or Yahoo! Answers aren’t traditionally in either category while operating in the Q&A market.^[1]

Background

Q&A Software is often provided to corporate and specialist sites, so the site and its users can be asked questions as well as provide or receive expert answers to them. This kind of software is particularly useful for responding to questions regarding specific industries. Users may learn by regularly answering questions or exchanging views with other industry specialists using the website.

The development of Q&A software can be attributed to man's knowledge-sharing behavior, which can be traced back to 15,000 BC when humans started to use imagery to capture and record knowledge.^[2] Humans used written language, books, newspapers and other written media and databases as a major way to record and share knowledge.

In the late 1990s, a free online service called Answer Point provided by Ask Jeeves, was launched, allowing users to ask questions and with the help of other people, have them answered. The slogan of the service, "The Ask Jeeves Answer Point is the place where you can ask and answer questions. Have a question? Post it! Know the answer? Post it! ^[3]", indicated the main function of it, which inspired the creation of later Q&A sites. The last archived version of the Ask Point was from late 2001 when it still allowed registration.^[3]

Since then, more and more sites have begun to offer Q&A services. Google launched its Q&A service called Google Questions and Answers in August 2001 which used Google staffers to answer questions by e-mail. A flat fee (US$3.00) was involved for an answer. In April 2002, Google launched Google Answers, which allowed users to post answers to questions, to replace its predecessor. Google Answers cost askers $2 to $200 for an accepted answer. By late December 2006, it was fully closed to new activity.

In early 2000's, Yahoo! launched its online Q&A service called Ask Yahoo!, which was later replaced by the beta version of Yahoo! Answers on December 8, 2005. Ask Yahoo! was discontinued in March 2006. Yahoo! Answers give members the chance to earn points, thus encouraging user participation. To support countries using non-English characters, Yahoo! Answers operate different platforms in some Asian countries, such as Yahoo! Chiebukuro (Yahoo!知恵袋?) in Japan and as Yahoo! Knowledge in Korea, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong.

Quora was founded in June 2009, while the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.

From 2010 with the widespread use of smartphones and tablets, there is an increasing number of Q&A sites that decide to launch mobile applications. Popular Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers and Quora have launched their own mobile applications. There is also a booming of new Q&A software such as Canvass which purely rely on mobile applications as their service channel.

Mechanics

Aims are similar to any forum software:

• ask a question
• answer a question
• correct/punish bad answers
• find a question you need the answer to
• find questions you can answer

What defines a system as Q&A software is generally:

• differentiate questions and answers (most extra features that affect answers should not affect the question)
• differentiate answers (replies to the question) and comments (replies to an answer)
• vote up/down answers
• sort answers by votes or questions by answered status
• accept an answer
• question tagging and tag search
• mark a question as a duplicate of another one

Online Community

The change of Q&A community features: Early definition described three types of Q&A Sites: "digital reference services", "ask an expert service", and "community Q&A sites."^[4] "Ask an expert service" represents a technological and social way of providing quality question answering service. This service is staffed by domain experts. In comparison, community Q&A sites involved everyday users in answering questions – it largely increased the number of contributors. Established examples of community Q&A sites are Yahoo! Answers and Quora. One of the problems of these communities is that it is hard to control the quality of answers compared with "ask an expert service".

However, in recent years, community Q&A sites tend to embrace newer interaction designs than the other types of Q&A sites, by providing features like tagging and rating interfaces, RSS feeds, and highly interactive browsing and searching capabilities. These features utilized the crowd power to evaluate the quality of answers and also the reliability of the contributors. Some communities as Zhihu tags the users received highest votes in a given domain as "Excellent answer provider". These new features generally integrate expert verification and service into Q&A community sites.

Social and information structure: Originally, Q&A communities have little structural or role-based organization. In recent years, we found that some communities started to form social and information structures. This is driven by the increasing number of contributors and the adoption of new features as mentioned above. Research shows that there are three different connection networks (or graphs) inside communities such as Quora. A graph connecting topics to users, a social graph connecting users, and a graph connecting related questions.^[5] These connections help users find the topic that they are looking for and build a social connection with people sharing the same interests. Also, as contributors gather according to a common theme, their votes help to screen out the domain expert and the high quality questions in that field. Also, the heterogeneity in the user and question graphs are significant contributors to the quality of the community's knowledge base.

Why users contribute knowledge to online communities:^[6] The social capital theory, social exchange theory, and social cognitive theory^[6] explain why users continuously contribute knowledge to online social Q&A communities. On the other hand, many feel hesitant to contribute due to fear of criticism or of misleading the online community members^[7] The contributors can have intrinsic or extrinsic motivation to contribute. Further, the motivations to share knowledge can be categorized into and individual-based and organization or website based motivations. Website based motivations (extrinsic) include rewards and incentives to the contributions like upvotes or coupons.^[6] Individual-based motivations (intrinsic) would constitute factors like a belief in knowledge ownership, individual characteristics, interpersonal trust, and will for justice.^[6]

Impact

Because Q&A software and websites are considered forms of crowdsourcing systems, it's inevitable that they have wide-ranging impacts that can be either positive or negative. As a whole, crowdsourcing systems tend to have mostly positive impacts, which is how sites such as Quora and StackOverflow have become so popular.^[8]

Q&A sites are extremely accessible, so a question that someone asks on a site will inevitably be read by hundred of users across the globe. However, due to this, there could be malicious users trying to spread false information or asking "trolling" questions on the sites. To prevent this, most Q&A software and website have communities where members naturally have more impact on the site based on a positive reputation that they’ve built up. See the Community section for more details.

Depending on how much users are committed to a certain site, they will have varying levels of impact in their contributions. For most Q&A software, there are both novice and veteran users who frequent the site to either look for answers or help others. Veteran users are most likely to have more of an impact when they contribute because of the reputation they may hold among the community members. The questions that veteran users ask are more likely to be answered because other community members know that these veteran users, in turn, will help others as well. Similarly, the answers that veteran users provide tend to be more helpful, as they have been around longer and know the type of quality answers that people are looking for.^[9]

On the other hand, novice users will likely have less of an impact because they have not yet earned the trust of community members. Sometimes, it may be hard to tell whether a novice user is "trolling" the website by asking a useless question, or whether they actually don’t know the answer to the question. On top of that, novice users’ answers may also be of malicious intent and contain misinformation. Fortunately, tools like upvoting and downvoting help play a role in seeding out these types of malicious answers, and a novice user who gets many up votes could be well on their way to having a good reputation in the online community.

Thus, different types of users will have varying amounts of impact depending on how much the Q&A community trusts their input. Additionally, many of the tools that Q&A software and websites provide, such as voting and accepting an answer, help prevent malicious users from overriding the positive impact that well-intentioned users make.^[10] It is vital for these websites to maintain the integrity of the community and a positive impact in order to succeed.

Comparison of Q&A software

A complete comparison of Q&A sites can be found in the wiki pages listed below.

Only self-hostable solutions are in scope for this table.^[11]

References