A study of users’ information quality judgment on open knowledge sharing system: A case study on Yahoo! Knowledge

Nowadays, open knowledge sharing system is on of the Internet resources which users rely on. Lots of users search and share information in this kind of system. However, the state that without information quality control mechanism in such system allows any user to share information, leads to information quality discrepancy. Therefore, investigating how users judging information quality turns into an issue. Yahoo! Knowledge is one kind of such system, which is very popular in Taiwan. Thus, this study selected Yahoo! Knowledge to be the study object.

This study recruited 12 subjects from National Taiwan University. Subjects were from 3 disciplines: 4 from biology and agriculture, 4 from science and engineering, and 4 from liberal arts and social science. 1 subject was PhD student, 3 subjects were graduate students, and 8 subjects were undergraduate students. All subjects were asked to perform four types of simulated tasks, inclusive of “problem solving and conversational question (type I)”, “problem solving and informational question (type II)”, “non-problem solving and informational question (type III)”, and “non-problem solving and conversational question (type IV)”. For four types, subjects had to choose one task which he/she was more interested in. After choosing task, subjects had to read the text of task and select 3 to 6 answers which he/she was most satisfied with according to the content of task. All the relevant answers were selected previously by researcher. The process of task performing was recorded by Morae software. Via PC connecting, researcher observed the subject by another computer. After the subject finished 4 tasks, researcher interviewed with him/her immediately to clarify his/her thoughts and actions.

Results show that users make predictive judgments and evaluative judgments when making judgments of information quality. Besides, subjects make predictive judgments and evaluative judgments by iterative way, two-stage way, or mixed way (combining the iterative way with two stage way). The study also finds that the clues noticed by subjects when making judgments can be classified into 5 categories, including “information form”, “social aspect”, “metadata”, “information content”, and “time aspect”. The results of clue interpretation are divided into “positive interpretation” and “negative interpretation”; the former leads to the willingness to click or select information and the later leads to rejection to do so. Furthermore, the same clue may be interpreted into the opposite results, which means that clue interpretation is highly subjective. Previous study has discovered 6 classes of information quality criteria, including “content”, “cognitive”, “utility”, “information source”, “extrinsic”, “socio-emotional”. This study not only finds these classes again, but also discovers new classes: “social assessment” and “time aspect”. In sum, information quality criteria have 8 classes. Another significant finding is that task type affects on the frequency of clue noticing, the frequency of criterion using, dependence on predictive judgment or evaluative judgment, and consensus about information quality. However, task type has little impacts on clue interpretation; in 32 kinds of clues, there is only one kind which has interpretation divergence due to task type. To summarize the research results, this study presents the model of judgments of information quality.