Classify Participants in Online Communities
International Journal of Managing Information Technology (IJMIT) ISSN: 0975-5586 (Online); 0975-5926 (Print) http://airccse.org/journal/ijmit/ijmit.html Article: Classify Participants in Online Communities Authors Xuequn Wang1 and Yanjun Yu2, 1Washington State University, USA and 2Southern University at New Orleans, USA Abstract As online communities become increasingly popular, researchers have tried to examine participating activities in online communities as well as how to sustain online communities. However, relatively few studies have tried to understand what kinds of participants constitute online communities. In this study, we try to contribute online community research by developing “common language” to classify different participants in online communities. Specifically, we argue that the previous way to classify participants is not sufficient and accurate, and we propose a continuum to classify participants based on participants’ overa...