In favour of or against multi-lingual Q&A sites? Exploring the evidence from user and knowledge perspectives

ABSTRACT

Many Q&A sites initially run only in English, and then gradually release their multi-lingual variants to serve users who speak other languages. The launch of such multi-lingual sites always lead to an intense dispute about the pros and cons of multi-lingual sites. Although all arguments and concerns sound reasonable, people can rarely provide solid evidence to convince each other. In this paper, from users' comments about the launch of several non-English Stack Overflow sites, we first identify three major concerns including community split, knowledge needs and interests in other languages, and knowledge fragmentation and duplication. To validate these three concerns, we conduct an evidence-based data analysis and comparison of user characteristics, tag usage and cross-site links between the Russian Stack Overflow and the English Stack Overflow on these three concerns. Our study sheds light on the existence value and risks of multi-lingual Q&A sites.

KEYWORDS:

• Multi-lingual Q&A site
• stack overflow
• community split
• knowledge needs and interests
• knowledge fragmentation and duplication
• cross-lingual retrieval

Acknowledgments

The research is supported by the Shanxi Datong University Project (No. 2012k6) and Shanxi Datong University Educational Reform Project (No. xjg2015202).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://stackoverflow.blog.

2 https://blog.quora.com.

3 We obtain the data dump of Stack Overflow from the website https://archive.org/details/stackexchange.

4 https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-beta.

5 https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-cities-in-Russia-2040243.

6 https://stackoverflow.com/users/276994.

7 https://ru.stackoverflow.com/users/10105.

8 https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges.

9 https://ru.stackoverflow.com/questions/55464/.

10 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8205102/.

Additional information

Funding

The research is supported by the Shanxi Datong University Project (No. 2012k6) and Shanxi Datong University Educational Reform Project (No. xjg2015202).