Question answering (Q&A) sites, where communities of volunteers answer questions, may provide faster, cheaper, and better services than traditional institutions. However, like other Web 2.0 platforms, user-created content raises concerns about information quality. At the same time, Q&A sites may provide answers of different quality because they have different communities and technological platforms. This paper compares answer quality on four Q&A sites: Askville, WikiAnswers, Wikipedia Reference Desk, and Yahoo! Answers. Findings indicate that: 1) the use of similar collaborative processes on these sites results in a wide range of outcomes. Significant differences in answer accuracy, completeness, and verifiability were found; 2) answer multiplication does not always result in better information. Answer multiplication yields more complete and verifiable answers but does not result in higher accuracy levels; and 3) a Q&A site's popularity does not correlate with its answer quality, on all three measures.
When Fichman compared answer quality among four Q&A sites, the concept of answer quality was determined by the reliability as constructed by three specific measures: accuracy, completeness, and verifiability REF .
A comparative assessment of answer quality on four question answering sites
J. Inf. Sci.
J. Inf. Sci.
Computer Science