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Cited by 553

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 27 of the 27 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west

Mamykina, Lena, Manoim, Bella, Mittal, Manas, Hripcsak, George, Hartmann, Björn·2011·Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Abstract

This paper analyzes a Question & Answer site for programmers, Stack Overflow, that dramatically improves on the utility and performance of Q&A systems for technical domains. Over 92% of Stack Overflow questions about expert topics are answered - in a median time of 11 minutes. Using a mixed methods approach that combines statistical data analysis with user interviews, we seek to understand this success. We argue that it is not primarily due to an a priori superior technical design, but also to the high visibility and daily involvement of the design team within the community they serve. This model of continued community leadership presents challenges to both CSCW systems research as well as to attempts to apply the Stack Overflow model to other specialized knowledge domains.

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Cites

Show all 27 references

Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. 10.5555/1738960 · doi:10.5555/1738960
  2. Gy öngyi, Z., Koutrika , G. , Pedersen , J. , and Garcia-Molina , H . Questioning Yahoo! Answers . Proceedings of the First Workshop on Question Answering on the Web (at WWW 2008) , ( 2008 ). Gyöngyi, Z., Koutrika, G., Pedersen, J., and Garcia-Molina, H. Questioning Yahoo! Answers. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Question Answering on the Web (at WWW 2008), (2008).
  3. 10.1145/1718487.1718526 · doi:10.1145/1718487.1718526
  4. Raban , D. R. and Harper , F. M . Motivations for Answering Questions Online Abstract . New Media and Innovative Technologies , ( 2008 ). Raban, D. R. and Harper, F. M. Motivations for Answering Questions Online Abstract. New Media and Innovative Technologies, (2008).
  5. 10.5555/580808 · doi:10.5555/580808

Cited by

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Metadata

Authors
Mamykina, L., Manoim, B., Mittal, M., Hripcsak, G., & Hartmann, B.
Venue
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher
ACM
Published
2011-05-07
Pages
2857-2866
OpenAlex
W2099769844
Cited by
553
References
27
FWCI
33.17
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/1978942.1979366
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Mamykina, L., Manoim, B., Mittal, M., Hripcsak, G., & Hartmann, B. (2011). Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979366

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.