What Do Developers Use the Crowd For? A Study Using Stack Overflow
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stack Overflow relies on the crowd to construct quality developer-related knowledge. To determine what developers use this knowledge for, researchers analyzed 1,414 Stack Overflow-related code commits. The developers used this knowledge to support development tasks and collect user feedback. The researchers also studied Stack Overflow posts' helpfulness and timeliness. The crowd was the most helpful on topics such as development tools and programming languages. The questions that took the longest to resolve were related to Web frameworks. The study findings can help developers better understand how to effectively use Stack Overflow, can help Stack Overflow designers improve their platform, and can help the research community understand Stack Overflow's strengths and weaknesses as a development tool. This article is part of a special issue on Crowdsourcing for Software Engineering.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it