Abstract:

More and more users start to use social question answering (SQA) sites as sources for information seeking and sharing. As an example, zhihu.com allows users to edit topic tags and the relationships among them, resulting a hierarchical taxonomy of topics which is essential to the organization and retrieval of its content. This research aims to analyze the conflicts and collaboration during the social construction of topic structures in Zhihu.com. Using an analysis framework based on knowledge construction, we analyzed 10,778 editing logs of 1,037 topics in four domains including literature, philosophy, physics and sociology. Results show that the knowledge construction process of topic structure in Zhihu.com is unintentional and shallow; users didn’t involve in higher level of collaboration partially due to the lack of collaborative functions of the system. The results are useful in understanding the conflicts and collaboration among users in constructing the topic taxonomy, and future research will expand the data set to get more generalizable results and to explore the best ways to resolve the conflicts.

Key words: Knowledge collaboration, Knowledge construction conflicts, Folkonomy, Collaborative roles, Communication function, Social tagging, Zhihu