The Role of Diverse Strategies in Sustainable Knowledge Production
arXiv:1509.05083 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0149151
Abstract
Online communities are becoming increasingly important as platforms for large-scale human cooperation. These communities allow users seeking and sharing professional skills to solve problems collaboratively. To investigate how users cooperate to complete a large number of knowledge-producing tasks, we analyze StackExchange, one of the largest question and answer systems in the world. We construct attention networks to model the growth of 110 communities in the StackExchange system and quantify individual answering strategies using the linking dynamics of attention networks. We identify two types of users taking different strategies. One strategy (type A) aims at performing maintenance by doing simple tasks, while the other strategy (type B) aims investing time in doing challenging tasks. We find that the number of type A needs to be twice as big as type B users for a sustainable growth of communities.
arXiv comment10 pages, 3 figures
References in corpus (10)
- Emergence of scaling in random networks
- Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
- Classes of behavior of small-world networks
- Structure of Growing Networks: Exact Solution of the Barabasi--Albert's Model
- Novelty and Collective Attention
- Collaborative Tagging and Semiotic Dynamics
- The Metabolism and Growth of Web Forums
- Accelerating Growth and Size-dependent Distribution of Human Activities Online
- Effects of Preference for Attachment to Low-degree Nodes on the Degree Distributions of a Growing Directed Network and a Simple Food-Web Model
- The Accelerating Growth of Online Tagging Systems