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]

History

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.

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!",[2] 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.

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 2000s, 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.

Motivation

Based on the characteristics of an online Q&A community, which including no reputation-ranking mechanism and no financial reward for users’ knowledge-contribution behaviors, and no mutual interest or conflict between users, people are wondering about the reason that motivates users to contribute their knowledge on the Q&A software. Feeling safe and trusting the software and the Internet environment provides a foundation for users to share their knowledge. People who trust the software more tend to be involved more in question and answer activities. The knowledge contribution from others leads to even more people to share their knowledge. Users who read more contributed knowledge tend to contribute more generally. Users are also seeking recognition when they contribute knowledge on the Q&A software. Social rewards such as approval, status, and respect play a very important role in motivating people to contribute to the Q&A software. User's eagerness of showing their knowledge and expertise and the potential chance of being noticed by recruiters also play a role in motivating people to answer questions and contribute questions.[3]

Classification

An online Q&A service serves the public with its ease of getting access without temporal and spatial constraints. The mechanism over all Q&A services is the same: Questioners express their information needs in the form of a question, and people (experts, or other users in the system) answer those questions based on their knowledge. Online Q&A service can be classified into several types in terms of who answer questions, and how services maintain and control the quality of information. Shah et al. (2009)[4] classified online Q&A service into three categories:

• Digital reference services: Also known as virtual reference, it is an extended version of traditional reference service where users in the library can get help from librarians with identifying desired materials. The advantage comes from the fact that users can have access anytime without physical constraints. The current services in this type include Ask an IPL Librarian of the Internet Public Library, and the Educators’ Reference Desk
• Expert services: Organizations other than libraries offer Q&A service where experts in a specific area answer questions. Some are fee-based (e.g., NetWellness (http://www.netwellness.org), whereas others offer free-service (e.g., PickAnswer (http://pickanswer.com)
• Social Q&A (community Q&A): In social Q&A services, any user in the community can ask or answer questions. Since a question can receive attention from many people unlike expert service, questioners are likely to benefit from the wisdom of crowds. The set of answers made by a large number of people often surpasses answers from experts in a traditional Q&A service. Harper, Raban, Rafaeli, and Konstan (2008)[5] proved that a social Q&A system ended up with a better quality of answers than those of library reference services by comparing existing services.

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."[6] "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 used 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.[7] 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.

Mechanics

Motivations

The social capital theory, social exchange theory, and social cognitive theory[3] 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[8] 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.[3] Individual-based motivations (intrinsic) would constitute factors like a belief in knowledge ownership, individual characteristics, interpersonal trust, and will for justice.[3] Specifically, two kinds of motivations drive people to participate in online Q&A: Why do people ask questions, and answer questions?

Motivation for asking: While there are other ways of fulfilling information needs, more people have been asking questions in online Q&A services. What motivates people to take advantage of those systems? And what do users expect from using systems? Choi (2014) surveyed 200 people who actively asked questions on Yahoo! Answers, and asked them the motivations and expectations of asking behaviors in online Q&A system. The five most significant factors of asking behaviors in the survey are:

• Learning; Self-education through acquiring information
• Having fun asking a question
• Seeking advice or opinions for making decisions
• Finding relevant information
• Gaining a sense of security through knowledge

Expectation from askers: The next step regarding the cycle of question and answering behaviors is for askers to assess answers to see if answers meet their expectations from information needs. In the same survey examined by Choi (2014),[9] the most desired factor was “Additional or alternative information (4.03 / 5)”, followed by “Accurate and complete information”. It is interesting that factors related to information itself surpassed “social and emotional support (2.47 / 5)” which is related to affective needs.

Motivation for answering: Answering behaviors have raised the curiosity among researchers, because there will be no explicit compensations against the activity. Raban and Harper (2008)[9] asked people who answered questions on social Q&A about the motivation of their answering behavior as well in the same survey. The top ranked motivations are:

• Reputation enhancement
• Enjoyment in helping others
• Reciprocity
• Knowledge self-efficacy
• Satisfaction
• Confirmation
• Continuance intention

Crowdsourcing

Q&A software uses a sourcing model called crowdsourcing to obtain answers to the questions that are posted.^[8] Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing work to an undefined, networked labor using an open call for participation,[10] and it is used to support the activities on most Q&A software (such as Stack Exchange, Quora, etc.). This technique allows the user to obtain answers from a large community, with lower costs and defect rates to the developers.[10]

The user asks their question which can be answered by any member of that online community. The answers then go through an assessment, wherein the good answers are upvoted and the bad answers are downvoted by the users (or a similar parallel on different platforms).[11] The members of the online community can find a question that needs answering to and answer that question.

This type of crowd participation in a Q&A platform has the potential to increase the knowledge of individual users, thus improving and speeding up their work process.[12] The abundance of information to which users are exposed through this system is effectively changing the way people collaborate, communicate and learn in online communities.[12]

Some other defining features of a Q&A software includes:

• differentiation of questions and answers (features that affect answers should not affect the question)
• differentiation of answers (replies to the question) and comments (replies to an answer)
• user voting of answers
• sorting of answers by votes and questions by answered status
• approval of an answer
• question tagging and tag search
• marking a question as a duplicate of another one (if the event occurs)

Impact

Q&A sites and software as a way of coordinating development and user support activities, compared to the traditional mail list, have a significant impact on the user behavior.[13]

A large number of users shift from the mail list to the Q&A software. The number of the user of Q&A significantly increased and the number of activities of the traditional mail list decreased. In addition, users of the Q&A software tend to provide answer faster. 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.[13]

Comparison of Q&A software

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

See also: Comparison of Q&A sites and Comparison of wiki software

Only self-hostable solutions are in scope for this table.[14]

	Stable release date	Free software	Committers	Size	Multilingual	Language	Abuse prevention	Private questions	Authentication	Customisation	Web API	Export, import	Other
Askbot	2017-03-01[15]	Yes (GPLv3)	100+[16]	30k+ questions in some sites[17][18]	Yes[19][20]	Python	Partial[21] (moderators,[22] premoderation recommended[23])	Partial[24][25]	LDAP,[26] OpenID, OAuth[27]	Skins,[28] other[29]	Partial (read-only, only questions[30])	Yes (conversion from some apps,[31][32] server-side dump import/export[33])	Email Q&A,[34] autotweeting, user tags newsletter, other[35]
Atlassian Confluence Question		No[36]		25k+ questions in one site[37]								Unpublished migration script from OSQA exists.[38][39]
Biostars	2012-04-23	Yes, MIT	10+	45k+ question in the top site[40]		Python					Maybe
OSQA	2011? (2015 master)[41]	Maybe (GPLv3; open core version of Answerhub)	30+[42]	25k question top, 5k+ in multiple sites[43]			Maybe[44][45][46]
Phabricator Ponder	2015	Yes (Apache v.2)									Maybe
Pligg core "story submission"[47]	2014-08[48]	Maybe (CC-BY)	5+	2k+[49]
Qhub		No
Question2Answer	2019-01-12[50]	Yes, GPL	15+[51]	20k+ sites, 6m+ questions[52]	Yes[53]	PHP	Yes[54]	Partial[55]		Themes,[56] Plugins[57]

See also

• Comparison of Q&A sites
• Knowledge market
• Online community
• Crowdsourcing
• Reputation system

References

1. "HOW TO: Set Up a Q&A Website in Minutes – the Best Options Reviewed & Compared". Inspired Mag. Retrieved 12 December 2013.
2. "Web Search History: Before Google Answers and Yahoo Answers There Was "Answer Point" From Ask Jeeves | Search Engine Watch". searchenginewatch.com. Retrieved 2017-02-04.
3. Jin, Jiahua; Li, Yijun; Zhong, Xiaojia; Zhai, Li (2015-11-01). "Why users contribute knowledge to online communities: An empirical study of an online social Q&A community". Information & Management. Novel applications of social media analytics. 52 (7): 840–849. doi:10.1016/j.im.2015.07.005.
4. Shah, Chirag; Oh, Sanghee; Oh, Jung Sun (2009). "Research agenda for social Q&A". Library & Information Science Research. 31 (4): 205–209. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2009.07.006.
5. Raban, Daphne R.; Harper, F. Maxwell. Motivations for Answering Questions Online Abstract. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.119.1962.
6. Maxwell, Harper (2008). "Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
7. Wang, Gang (2013). "Wisdom in the social crowd: an analysis of quora". Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web. ACM: 1341–1352. doi:10.1145/2488388.2488506. ISBN 9781450320351.
8. Ardichvili, Alexander; Page, Vaughn; Wentling, Tim (2003-03-01). "Motivation and barriers to participation in virtual knowledge‐sharing communities of practice". Journal of Knowledge Management. 7 (1): 64–77. doi:10.1108/13673270310463626. ISSN 1367-3270.
9. Choi, Erik. "Motivations and Expectations for Asking Questions Within Online Q&A" (PDF). Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
10. Mao, Ke; Capra, Licia; Harman, Mark; Jia, Yue; A survey of the use of crowdsourcing in software engineering. (2016, September 20)
11. Yao, Tong, et al. “Detecting high-quality posts in community question answering sites”
12. Vasilescu, Bogdan, et al. “StackOverflow and GitHub: Associations Between Software Development and Crowdsourced Knowledge.”
13. Vasilescu, Bogdan; Serebrenik, Alexander; Devanbu, Prem; Filkov, Vladimir (2014). "How Social Q&A Sites Are Changing Knowledge Sharing in Open Source Software Communities". Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. CSCW '14. New York, NY, USA: ACM: 342–354. doi:10.1145/2531602.2531659. ISBN 9781450325400.
14. There are potentially more. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/37953
15. "askbot 0.10.2".
16. "The Askbot Open Source Project on Open Hub".
17. "Questions - Ask LibreOffice".
18. "Questions - Ask Fedora: Community Knowledge Base and Support Forum". Archived from the original on 2018-10-30. Retrieved 2015-04-23.
19. "Domande - Ask LibreOffice".
20. "Better multilingual organization?".
21. "Questions - My site".
22. "Moderation in Askbot — Askbot 0.7.54 documentation".
23. "Are there logs we can look at to see how a user created an account?".
24. "Can you make private questions?".
25. "can askbot be a private membership site".
26. "Optional modules — Askbot 0.7.54 documentation".
27. "How can I add an oauth2 custom login provider to askbot ?".
28. "Skin system in Askbot — Askbot 0.7.54 documentation".
29. "Questions - My site".
30. "Askbot API — Askbot 0.7.54 documentation".
31. "Import other forums into Askbot — Askbot 0.7.54 documentation".
32. "[Fundraiser] Is it possible to migrate from OSQA to AskBot?".
33. "Askbot management commands — Askbot 0.7.54 documentation".
34. "Sending email to askbot — Askbot 0.7.54 documentation".
35. "Which features do you want in Ask Fedora?".
36. "Confluence Questions - Knowledge Sharing Software - Atlassian". Atlassian.
37. "Questions - Atlassian Answers".
38. "When will Atlassian be able to share the OSQA to Confluence Questions conversion scripts?".
39. "[CQ-1475] Publish AAC migration scripts - Atlassian JIRA".
40. "About Biostars".
41. "Download".
42. "The OSQA Open Source Project on Open Hub".
43. "What sites are running OSQA?".
44. "Is OSQA dead?".
45. "Lockergnome Community Q&A".
46. "OSQA spammers keep siging up".
47. "How can I create 'Question Answer' website using Pligg? - Pligg Support". Pligg CMS.
48. Pligg. "Releases · Pligg/pligg-cms · GitHub". GitHub.
49. "Top Users - Pligg Support". Pligg CMS.
50. q2a. "Releases · q2a/question2answer · GitHub". GitHub.
51. q2a. "Contributors to q2a/question2answer · GitHub". GitHub.
52. "Question2Answer sites".
53. "Translating Question2Answer".
54. "Question2Answer features".
55. "Only logged in users can view questions and answers". Q2A Q&A.
56. "Creating themes for Question2Answer".
57. "Creating plugins for Question2Answer".

50. Jump up^ Ask the Internet – Top 10 Websites to Post Questions and Answers