Abstract
Through the developing of Internet, more and more users are used to seek knowledge on it. The knowledge need people to share them on the internet. Therefore, why the “people” do like to share, become a very interesting issue. In Taiwan, the most famous Q&A website is Yahoo! Kimo Knowledge+ (thereafter, denoted as Knowledge+.) Google launched a Q&A website called Google Answers on 2002, and it was closed on 2006. What reason to make this result (One survive and one decay)? In this study, we focus on Knowledge+. At the beginning, we spent three months to observe on 10 users who reached the highest rank of Knowledge+, and we then interviewed with three of them. In this research, we focus on the higher level sharing people. We adapted Theory of Reasoned Action. In the reward way, Knowledge+ uses virtual reward whereas Google Answers used monetary awards. In expert identification, everyone can share on Knowledge+ whereas Google will identify the expert before they have the right to share. From the different, we add “Reward” and “Self-efficacy” as our constructs. On the other hand, we also think about the personality and the virtual community feature of Knowledge+ and add “Altruism” and “the Sense of virtual Community.” We received 167 available responses, and also analysis them by different ranks. According to the result, we conclude that for higher level sharer, they need emotional attachment rather than physical reward whereas the lower level sharer will motivate by physical reward. Secondly, the higher sharers do not like to feel control; they share because they are willing to rather than other reasons or motivates. For all these sharers, altruism is a factor that influence share or not.