Mining Stack Exchange: Expertise is Evident From Earliest Interactions
Daryl Posnett, Eric Warburg, Prémkumar Dévanbu, Vladimir Filkov · 2012
Stack Exchange is a very popular Question & Answer internet community. Users can post questions on a wide variety of topics; other users provide answers, usually within minutes. Participants are not compensated for their services and anyone can freely gain value from the efforts of the users; Stack Exchange is therefore a gift economy. Users, however, do gain reputation points when other users “upvote” their questions and/or answers. Stack Exchange thus functions as a learning community with a strong reputation-seeking element that creates a valuable public good, viz., the QA indeed the data suggests that overall answer scores decrease, and that people’s tenure with the community is unrelated to the quality of their answers. Most interestingly, we show that answering skill, i.e. getting high average answer scores, which is different than reputation, is evident from the start and persists during one’s tenure with the community. Conversely, people providing low rated answers are likely to have done so from the start.