Participation Differences in Q&A Sites Across Countries
Nigini Oliveira, Nazareno Andrade, Katharina Reinecke · 2016
While the success of online Question & Answer (Q&A) sites relies on user contributions, previous work has shown that the number of contributions varies between countries. What remains unknown is whether this is due to a few people contributing a lot, or whether highly represented countries have a higher percentage of users who are willing to contribute. In this paper, we investigate this question with the goal of identifying opportunities to equalize contributions between countries. Analyzing the data from StackOverflow and Superuser, two popular Q&A sites, we find that the percentage of contributing users significantly varies between 116 countries, and that these differences can be partly explained by a country's national culture and overall English proficiency. We discuss how specific design decisions on these sites, such as the competitive reward mechanism used to encourage contributions, could be changed to encourage currently passive people to contribute.