Exploring activeness of users in QA forums

Abstract

Success of a Q&A forum depends on volume of content (questions and answers) and quality of content (are the questions asked relevant, answers provided correct etc). Community participation is essential to create and curate content. Since their inception in 2008, stack exchange based forums have been able to engage a large number of users to create a rich repository of good quality questions and answers. In this paper, we wish to investigate the "activeness" of users in the stackexchange network particularly from a perspective of content creation. We also attempt to measure how the forums' incentive mechanism has enabled user's activeness. Further, we investigate how user's have diffused to other parts of the stack exchange network over time, hence bootstrapping new forums. © 2013 IEEE.