Abstract
Question and Answering (Q&A) communities have become effective forums for humans to collaborate and build accurate domain-specific archives of information. Stack Overflow is a prime example of a system which has effectively leveraged Q&A to build a strong archive of computer programming information. However, English is the dominant language in size and scope. To reach a wider audience, Stack Overflow has started language-specific sites. In this paper, we seek to understand how these language version sites are used, and whether they form unique Q&A structures or mirror the English version. The results indicate that each site is structured differently, and that users of different languages have different question asking patterns. The contributions from this work are useful in informing designers of systems attempting to conduct language versioning and provide an argument for developing sites within languages, rather than only providing translated versions.
Recommended Citation
Vargo, Andrew; Tag, Benjamin; Kunze, Kai; and Matsubara, Shigeo, "Different Languages, Different Questions: Language Versioning in Q&A" (2018). UK Academy for Information Systems Conference Proceedings 2018. 10.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ukais2018/10