Activity-selection behavior of users in stackexchange websites

Abstract

In this work, we examine the disparity in contribution behavior of users with respect to the activities that they choose to perform on Q&A websites. We collect the data of 156 websites of StackExchange and analyze the contribution made by over 5.3 million users. We find that most of the users tend to contribute predominantly to one of the primary activities. Such a behavior yields a high-level distribution of users across the activities, which provides useful insights into the user base composition of these websites. In this work, we show how this distribution varies for StackExchange websites and discuss how it can be a valuable maintenance parameter for these websites.