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Cultivating Online: Understanding Expert and Farmer Participation in an Agricultural Q&A Community

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Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (ChineseCSCW 2019)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1042))

Abstract

Nowadays, due to the shortage of offline agricultural experts, hundreds of thousands of farmers in China seek online for cultivation advices. A key design issue here is to provide users with timely and high quality answers, which, for general Community-based Question and Answering (CQA) platforms such as Quora, has been extensively studied before. However, answering questions raised in agricultural CQA platforms requires domain knowledge and professional experience, and users are expected to behave differently. In this article, we conduct a case study on a agricultural CQA platform named Farm-Doctor. We obtain the whole knowledge repository of Farm-Doctor, we investigate the behavioral differences between experts and farmers, and we analyze the factors that influence the users’ answering behavior. Our results show that there exists obvious behavioral differences between experts and farmers, and differences also exist in the factors that influence user’s answering behavior. While recognition, i.e., whether answers are well received by the community, has a positive impact on the answering behavior of both experts and farmers, reciprocation, i.e., how their own questions are treated, works differently. Experts acknowledge the “effort” of the community, i.e., the number of answers they get for their own questions has a positive effect on the number of answers they provide whereas the quality of the answers does not. Farmers, on the other hand, care both the number and the quality of the answers. Our research provides valuable information for the community to motivate the users to answer questions and therefore helps farmers solving their cultivation problems, in hoping to improve their lives.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Xiaoxue Shen, Adele Lu Jia & Ruizhi Sun

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  1. Xiaoxue Shen
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  2. Adele Lu Jia
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  3. Ruizhi Sun
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Correspondence to Adele Lu Jia .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Shandong University, Jinan, China

    Yuqing Sun

  2. Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Tun Lu

  3. Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China

    Zhengtao Yu

  4. Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Hongfei Fan

  5. University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

    Liping Gao

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Shen, X., Jia, A.L., Sun, R. (2019). Cultivating Online: Understanding Expert and Farmer Participation in an Agricultural Q&A Community. In: Sun, Y., Lu, T., Yu, Z., Fan, H., Gao, L. (eds) Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. ChineseCSCW 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1042. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1377-0_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1377-0_26

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