Comparative Evaluation of Community Question Answering Websites

Abstract

This paper studies Community-driven Question-Answering (CQA) websites from the perspective of three dimensions, namely, information management, information quality, and system usability. The objective of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to develop a conceptual framework that encapsulates the three aspects. Second, using this framework, it attempts to perform a comparative evaluation of six CQA websites (three English and three Chinese). Information management is conceptualized by information sharing and information organization in websites while information quality consists of content value, cognitive value and socio-emotional value of information contained in the answers. System usability of websites is measured through Nielsen’s ten heuristic guidelines. Based on the results, three findings could be culled. First, information organization was more prevalent among the websites than information sharing. Second, socio-emotional value of information was more evident among the three measures of information quality. Third, all CQA websites indicated scope for improvement in their usability features.