Synergising the collective knowledge building portals

Abstract

The growth of crowdsourced knowledge-building portals such as Wikipedia, Quora, and Stack Exchange has been explosive in recent years, as evidenced by the enormous amounts of knowledge the portals currently possess. Wikipedia houses 6 million articles and Stack Overflow (one of the websites in the Stack Exchange network) has 18 million questions. It is interesting to observe that it is the crowd, and not the experts, that builds the knowledge on these knowledge-building portals. The crowd is responsible for the collaborative editing of Wikipedia articles, and on Stack Overflow, the crowd not only asks the questions but also answers them. However, the aforementioned knowledge-building portals employ two different types of collaborative knowledge-building practices. Wikipedia is a knowledge archival portal, it builds knowledge in the form of articles. On the other hand, Stack Overflow is a discussion forum that builds knowledge in the form of questions and answers. As collaborative knowledge-building practices, the knowledge archival on a wiki portal and the discussions on the QnA forum function independently of each other. Inspired by the success of both the types of knowledge-building practices (i.e. knowledge archival and discussion), we propose a union of the two sets of knowledge-building practices. In this thesis, we introduce QWiki, a novel approach to collaborative knowledge building that integrates a wiki portal and a QnA forum. The models and parameters proposed in the thesis establish the importance of the interaction of a wiki portal with a QnA forum and vice-versa. The integration of the QnA forum and the wiki portal results in a mutually-beneficial relationship in which the two knowledge-building portals address the limitations in one another. The readability of the knowledge present in portals such as Wikipedia is low, because of which users often fail to comprehend the information given in the articles. On the other hand, the knowledge in QnA forums such as Stack Exchange is scattered across the various discussion posts because of which it becomes difficult for the user to identify, comprehend or revisit the relevant information. The QWiki portal allows users to ask questions if they are unable to comprehend the information in a wiki article. It also enables the organization and archival of the information scattered across a QnA forum. Thus, an integration of the QnA forum and the wiki portal benefits and promotes knowledge-building in portals of both the types. The experimental analysis in this thesis demonstrates that QWiki contributes to the processes of knowledge acquisition and knowledge-building. Wikipedia has its own discussion environment called talk pages. In the thesis, we also present a detailed comparative analysis of the discussion environments in QWiki and Wikipedia i.e., the QnA forums and the talk pages. Further, an application of QWiki in an online learning environment is also discussed in detail.