Social information seeking is a field of research that involves studying situations, motivations, and methods for people seeking and sharing information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag, WikiAnswers and Twitter as well as building systems for supporting such activities. Highly related topics involve traditional and virtual reference services, information retrieval, information extraction, and knowledge representation. Background Social information seeking is often materialized in online question-answering (QA) websites, which are driven by a community. Such QA sites have emerged in the past few years as an enormous market, so to speak, for the fulfillment of information needs. Estimates of the volume of questions answered are difficult to come by, but it is likely that the number of questions answered on social/community QA (cQA) sites far exceeds the number of questions answered by library reference services, which until recently were one of the few institutional sources for such question answering. cQA sites make their content – questions and associated answers submitted on the site – available on the open web, and indexable by search engines, thus enabling web users to find answers provided for previously asked questions in response to new queries. The popularity of such sites have been increasing dramatically for the past several years. Major sites that provide a general platform for questions of all types include Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag and Quora. While other sites that focus on particular fields; for example, StackOverflow (computing). StackOverflow has 3.45 million questions, 1.3 million users and over 6.86 million answers since July 2008 while Quora has 437 thousand questions, 264 thousand users and 979 thousand answers. Social Q&A or cQA, according to Shah et al., consists of three components: a mechanism for users to submit questions in natural language, a venue for users to submit answers to questions, and a community built around this exchange. Viewed in that light, online communities have performed a question answering function perhaps since the advent of Usenet and Bulletin Board Systems, so in one sense cQA is nothing new. Websites dedicated to cQA, however, have emerged on the web only within the past few years: the first cQA site was the Korean Naver Knowledge iN, launched in 2002, while the first English-language CQA site was Answerbag, launched in April 2003. Despite this short history, however, cQA has already attracted a great deal of attention from researchers investigating information seeking behaviors, selection of resources,