An Exploratory Study on the Repeatedly Shared External Links on 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
On Stack Overflow, users reuse 11,926,354 external links to share the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow website. The external links connect to the existing programming-related knowledge and extend the crowdsourced knowledge on Stack Overflow. Some of the external links, so-called as repeated external links, can be shared for multiple times. We observe that 82.5% of the link sharing activities (i.e., sharing links in any question, answer, or comment) on Stack Overflow share external resources, and 57.0% of the occurrences of the external links are sharing the repeated external links. However, it is still unclear what types of external resources are repeatedly shared. To help users manage their knowledge, we wish to investigate the characteristics of the repeated external links in knowledge sharing on Stack Overflow. In this paper, we analyze the repeated external links on Stack Overflow. We observe that external links that point to the text resources (hosted in documentation websites, tutorial websites, etc.) are repeatedly shared the most. We observe that: 1) different users repeatedly share the same knowledge in the form of repeated external links, thus increasing the maintenance effort of knowledge (e.g., update invalid links in multiple posts), 2) the same users can repeatedly share the external links for the purpose of promotion, and 3) external links can point to webpages with an overload of information that is difficult for users to retrieve relevant information. Our findings provide insights to Stack Overflow moderators and researchers. For example, we encourage Stack Overflow to centrally manage the commonly occurring knowledge in the form of repeated external links in order to better maintain the crowdsourced knowledge on Stack Overflow.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it