Different Languages, Different Questions: Language Versioning in Q&A

Abstract

Question and Answering (Q&A) communities have become effective forums for humans to collaborate and build accurate domain-specific archives of information. Stack Overflow is a prime example of a system which has effectively leveraged Q&A to build a strong archive of computer programming information. However, English is the dominant language in size and scope. To reach a wider audience, Stack Overflow has started language-specific sites. In this paper, we seek to understand how these language version sites are used, and whether they form unique Q&A structures or mirror the English version. The results indicate that each site is structured differently, and that users of different languages hav..