Broken external links on stack overflow

Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow knowledge base substantially. However, with the rapid developme...

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Main Authors: LIU, Jiakun, XIA, Xin, LO, David, ZHANG, Haoxiang, ZOU, Ying, HASSAN, Ahmed E., LI, Shanping
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Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7647
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8650/viewcontent/TSE_Liu_2021.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-86502023-01-10T03:50:17Z Broken external links on stack overflow LIU, Jiakun XIA, Xin LO, David ZHANG, Haoxiang ZOU, Ying HASSAN, Ahmed E. LI, Shanping Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow knowledge base substantially. However, with the rapid development of programming-related knowledge, many resources hosted on the Internet are not available anymore. Based on our analysis of the Stack Overflow data that was released on Jun. 2, 2019, 14.2 percent of the links on Stack Overflow are broken links. The broken links on Stack Overflow can obstruct viewers from obtaining desired programming-related knowledge, and potentially damage the reputation of the Stack Overflow as viewers might regard the posts with broken links as obsolete. In this paper, we characterize the broken links on Stack Overflow. 65 percent of the broken links in our sampled questions are used to show examples, e.g., code examples. 70 percent of the broken links in our sampled answers are used to provide supporting information, e.g., explaining a certain concept and describing a step to solve a problem. Only 1.67 percent of the posts with broken links are highlighted as such by viewers in the posts’ comments. Only 5.8 percent of the posts with broken links removed the broken links. Viewers cannot fully rely on the vote scores to detect broken links, as broken links are common across posts with different vote scores. The websites that host resources that can be maintained by their users are referenced by broken links the most on Stack Overflow – a prominent example of such websites is GitHub. The posts and comments related to the web technologies, i.e., JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery, are associated with more broken links. Based on our findings, we shed lights for future directions and provide recommendations for practitioners and researchers. 2022-02-01T08:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7647 info:doi/10.1109/TSE.2021.3086494 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8650/viewcontent/TSE_Liu_2021.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Empirical Software Engineering Stack Overflow Broken Link Programming Languages and Compilers Software Engineering
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Empirical Software Engineering
Stack Overflow
Broken Link
Programming Languages and Compilers
Software Engineering
spellingShingle Empirical Software Engineering
Stack Overflow
Broken Link
Programming Languages and Compilers
Software Engineering
LIU, Jiakun
XIA, Xin
LO, David
ZHANG, Haoxiang
ZOU, Ying
HASSAN, Ahmed E.
LI, Shanping
Broken external links on stack overflow
description Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow knowledge base substantially. However, with the rapid development of programming-related knowledge, many resources hosted on the Internet are not available anymore. Based on our analysis of the Stack Overflow data that was released on Jun. 2, 2019, 14.2 percent of the links on Stack Overflow are broken links. The broken links on Stack Overflow can obstruct viewers from obtaining desired programming-related knowledge, and potentially damage the reputation of the Stack Overflow as viewers might regard the posts with broken links as obsolete. In this paper, we characterize the broken links on Stack Overflow. 65 percent of the broken links in our sampled questions are used to show examples, e.g., code examples. 70 percent of the broken links in our sampled answers are used to provide supporting information, e.g., explaining a certain concept and describing a step to solve a problem. Only 1.67 percent of the posts with broken links are highlighted as such by viewers in the posts’ comments. Only 5.8 percent of the posts with broken links removed the broken links. Viewers cannot fully rely on the vote scores to detect broken links, as broken links are common across posts with different vote scores. The websites that host resources that can be maintained by their users are referenced by broken links the most on Stack Overflow – a prominent example of such websites is GitHub. The posts and comments related to the web technologies, i.e., JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery, are associated with more broken links. Based on our findings, we shed lights for future directions and provide recommendations for practitioners and researchers.
format text
author LIU, Jiakun
XIA, Xin
LO, David
ZHANG, Haoxiang
ZOU, Ying
HASSAN, Ahmed E.
LI, Shanping
author_facet LIU, Jiakun
XIA, Xin
LO, David
ZHANG, Haoxiang
ZOU, Ying
HASSAN, Ahmed E.
LI, Shanping
author_sort LIU, Jiakun
title Broken external links on stack overflow
title_short Broken external links on stack overflow
title_full Broken external links on stack overflow
title_fullStr Broken external links on stack overflow
title_full_unstemmed Broken external links on stack overflow
title_sort broken external links on stack overflow
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2022
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7647
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8650/viewcontent/TSE_Liu_2021.pdf
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