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At the same time, Q&amp;A sites may provide answers of different quality because they have different communities and technological platforms. This paper compares answer quality on four Q&amp;A sites: Askville, WikiAnswers, Wikipedia Reference Desk, and Yahoo! Answers. Findings indicate that: (1) similar collaborative processes on these sites result in a wide range of outcomes, and significant differences in answer accuracy, completeness, and verifiability were evident; (2) answer multiplication does not always result in better information; it yields more complete and verifiable answers but does not result in higher accuracy levels; and (3) a Q&amp;A site\u2019s popularity does not correlate with its answer quality, on all three measures.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/0165551511415584","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2011,8,15]],"date-time":"2011-08-15T23:05:16Z","timestamp":1313449516000},"page":"476-486","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":67,"title":["A comparative assessment of answer quality on four question answering sites"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"37","author":[{"given":"Pnina","family":"Fichman","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Indiana University, Bloomington"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2011,8,15]]},"reference":[{"key":"bibr1-0165551511415584","volume-title":"The wisdom of crowds","author":"Surowiecki J","year":"2004"},{"key":"bibr2-0165551511415584","unstructured":"O\u2019Reilly T. \u2018What is Web 2.0?\u2019 http:\/\/www.oreillynet.com\/pub\/a\/oreilly\/tim\/news\/2005\/09\/30\/what-is-web-20.html (accessed 20 August 2008)."},{"key":"bibr3-0165551511415584","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Dom B, Paranjpe D. 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