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Record W3199935553

Measuring API documentation on the Web

2011· article· en· W3199935553 on OpenAlexaff
Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude

Bibliographic record

VenueSingapore Management University Institutional Knowledge (InK) (Singapore Management University) · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Victoria
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDocumentationWorld Wide WebSoftware documentationComputer scienceSocial mediaSocial softwareSoftwareSoftware developmentSocial webUser analysisSoftware development processHuman–computer interaction
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a developer is just a web search away. To understand whether documentation via social media can replace or augment more traditional forms of documentation, we study the extent to which the methods of one particular API — jQuery — are documented on the Web. We analyze 1,730 search results and show that software development blogs in particular cover 87.9 % of the API methods, mainly featuring tutorials and personal experiences about using the methods. Further, this effort is shared by a large group of developers contributing just a few blog posts. Our findings indicate that social media is more than a niche in software documentation, that it can provide high levels of coverage and that it gives readers a chance to engage with authors.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.976
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.003
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.002
Open science0.0030.002
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.051
GPT teacher head0.208
Teacher spread0.157 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2011
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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