Rollback Edit Inconsistencies in Developer Forum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The success of developer forums like Stack Overflow (SO) depends on the participation of users and the quality of shared knowledge. SO allows its users to suggest edits to improve the quality of the posts (i.e., questions and answers). Such posts can be rolled back to an earlier version when the current version of the post with the suggested edit does not satisfy the user. However, subjectivity bias in deciding either an edit is satisfactory or not could introduce inconsistencies in the rollback edits. For example, while a user may accept the formatting of a method name (e.g., getActivity()) as a code term, another user may reject it. Such bias in rollback edits could be detrimental and demotivating to the users whose suggested edits were rolled back. This problem is compounded due to the absence of specific guidelines and tools to support consistency across users on their rollback actions. To mitigate this problem, we investigate the inconsistencies in the rollback editing process of SO and make three contributions. First, we identify eight inconsistency types in rollback edits through a qualitative analysis of 777 rollback edits in 382 questions and 395 answers. Second, we determine the impact of the eight rollback inconsistencies by surveying 44 software developers. More than 80% of the study participants find our produced catalogue of rollback inconsistencies to be detrimental to the post quality. Third, we develop a suite of algorithms to detect the eight rollback inconsistencies. The algorithms offer more than 95% accuracy and thus can be used to automatically but reliably inform users in SO of the prevalence of inconsistencies in their suggested edits and rollback actions.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".