Determinants of collective intelligence quality: comparison between Wiki and Q&A services in English and Korean users

Although web-enabled collective intelligence (CI) plays a critical role in organizational innovation and collaboration, the dubious quality of CI is still a substantial problem faced by many CI services. Thus, it is important to identify determinants of CI quality and to analyze the relationship between CI quality and its usefulness. One of the most successful services of web-enabled CI is Wikipedia accessible all over the world. Another type of CI service is Naver KnowledgeiN, a typical and popular CI site offering question and answer (Q&A) services in Korea. Wikipedia is a multilingual and web-based encyclopedia. Thus, it is necessary to study the influence relationships among CI quality, its determinants, and CI usefulness according to different CI type and languages. In this paper, we propose a new research model reflecting multi-dimensional factors related to CI quality from user’s perspective. To test a total of 15 hypotheses drawn from the research model, a total of 691 responses were collected from Wikipedia and KnowledgeiN users in South Korea and US. Expertise of contributors, community size, and diversity of contributors were identified as determinants of perceived CI quality. Perceived CI quality has significantly influenced on perceived CI usefulness from user’s perspective. CI type and different language partially play a role of moderators. The expertise of contributors plays a more important role in CI quality in the case of Q&A services such as KnowledgeiN compared to Wiki services such as Wikipedia. This implies that Q&A service requires more expertise and experiences in particular areas rather than the case of Wiki service to improve service quality. The relationship between community size and perceived CI quality was different according to CI type. The community size has a greater effect on CI quality in case of Wiki service than that of Q&A service. The number of contributors in Wikipedia is important because Wiki is an encyclopedia service which is edited and revised repeatedly from many contributors while the answer given in Naver KnowledgeiN cannot be edited by others. Finally, CI quality has a greater effect on its usefulness in case of Wiki service rather than Q&A service. In this paper, we suggested implications for practitioners and theorists.