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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

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 Stack Exchange, one of the largest question and answer systems in the world. We construct attention networks to model the growth of 110 communities in the Stack Exchange system and quantify individual answering strategies using the linking dynamics on attention networks. We identify two answering strategies. Strategy A aims at performing maintenance by doing simple tasks, whereas strategy B aims at investing time in doing challenging tasks. Both strategies are important: empirical evidence shows that strategy A decreases the median waiting time for answers and strategy B increases the acceptance rate of answers. In investigating the strategic persistence of users, we find that users tends to stick on the same strategy over time in a community, but switch from one strategy to the other across communities. This finding reveals the different sets of knowledge and skills between users. A balance between the population of users taking A and B strategies that approximates 2:1, is found to be optimal to the sustainable growth of communities.

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    Title
    • The Role of Diverse Strategies in Sustainable Knowledge Production
    Contributors
    Date Created
    2016-03-02
    Resource Type
  • Text
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    Identifier
    • Digital object identifier: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149151
    • Identifier Type
      International standard serial number
      Identifier Value
      1045-3830
    • Identifier Type
      International standard serial number
      Identifier Value
      1939-1560
    Note
    • The article is published at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149151

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    This is a suggested citation. Consult the appropriate style guide for specific citation guidelines.

    Wu, L., Baggio, J. A., & Janssen, M. A. (2016). The Role of Diverse Strategies in Sustainable Knowledge Production. Plos One, 11(3). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0149151

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