3 F. Harper D. Raban S. Rafaeli J. Konstan 2008 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems <p>Question and answer (Q&amp;A) sites such as Yahoo! Answers are places where users ask questions and others answer them. In this paper, we investigate predictors of answer quality through a comparative, controlled field study of responses provided across several online Q&amp;A sites. Along with several quantitative results concerning the effects of factors such as question topic and rhetorical strategy, we present two high-level messages. First, you get what you pay for in Q&amp;A sites. Answer quality was typically higher in Google Answers (a fee-based site) than in the free sites we studied, and paying more money for an answer led to better outcomes. Second, we find that a Q&amp;A site’s community of users contributes to its success. Yahoo! Answers, a Q&amp;A site where anybody can answer questions, outperformed sites that depend on specific individuals to answer questions, such as library reference services.</p> http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357191