Users roles identification on online crowdsourced Q&A platforms and encyclopedias: a survey

Abstract

AbstractOnline informal learning and knowledge-sharing platforms, such as Stack Exchange, Reddit, and Wikipedia have been a great source of learning. Millions of people access these websites to ask questions, answer the questions, view answers, or check facts. However, one interesting question that has always attracted the researchers is if all the users share equally on these portals, and if not then how the contribution varies across users, and how it is distributed? Do different users focus on different kinds of activities and play specific roles? In this work, we present a survey of users’ social roles that have been identified on online discussion and Q&A platforms including Usenet newsgroups, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and MOOC forums, as well as on crowdsourced encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, and Baidu Baike, where users interact with each other through talk pages. We discuss the state of the art on capturing the variety of users roles through different methods including the construction of user network, analysis of content posted by users, temporal analysis of user activity, posting frequency, and so on. We also discuss the available datasets and APIs to collect the data from these platforms for further research. The survey is concluded with open research questions.