Learning in Communities: How Do Outstanding Users Differ From Other Users?

This paper reports on an investigation into outstanding and ordinary users of two Question & Answer (Q&A) communities. Considering some learning-related perspectives such as participation, linguistic traits, social ties, influence, and focus, we found that outstanding users are (i) more likely to engage in discussions; (ii) they tend to use more sophisticated linguistic traits; (iii) their inclusion into a discussion results in longer debates; (iv) they value the diversity of their connections; (v) they participate in several topics, rather than one specialist niche. These findings allow us to use behavioral patterns to predict whether a given user is outstanding and also predict which answer gives a definitive solution for a question.