Whither the Experts? Social Affordances and the Cultivation of Experts in Community Q&A Systems

Community based question and answer systems have been promoted as Web 2.0 solutions to the problem of finding expert knowledge. This promise depends on systemspsila capacity to attract and sustain experts capable of offering high quality, factual answers. Content analysis of dedicated contributorspsila messages in the live QnA system found: (1) few contributors who focused on providing technical answers (2) a preponderance of attention paid to opinion and discussion, especially in non-technical threads. This paucity of experts raises an important general question: how do the social affordances of a site alter the ecology of roles found there? Using insights from recent research in online community, we generate a series of expectations about how social affordances are likely to alter the role ecology of online systems.