Separating the wheat from the chaff: Evaluating success determinants for online Q&A communities

Abstract

Researchers and community managers try to measure the success of online communities using a variety of success determinants, such as member activity, turnover and interaction. Although many success determinants have been proposed in the literature, it remains largely unclear which are applicable to which kind of online communities. In this work, we focus on the use case of question answering (Q&A) communities, where we can measure asker satisfaction as an aspect of community success towards the goal of solving questions. We evaluate how well the proposed success determinants correlate to asker satisfaction, and we find that less than half of them are at least moderately (±0.3 or more) correlated. That underlines the importance of evaluating the proposed success determinants on real data of specific community types.