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How the R community creates and curates knowledge: an extended study of stack overflow and mailing lists

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Abstract

One of the effects of social media’s prevalence in software development is the many flourishing communities of practice where users share a common interest. These large communities use many different communication channels, but little is known about how they create, share, and curate knowledge using such channels. In this paper, we report a mixed methods study of how one community of practice, the R software development community, creates and curates knowledge associated with questions and answers (Q&A) in two of its main communication channels: the R tag in Stack Overflow and the R-Help mailing list. The results reveal that knowledge is created and curated in two main forms: participatory, where multiple users explicitly collaborate to build knowledge, and crowdsourced, where individuals primarily work independently of each other. Moreover, we take a unique approach at slicing the data based on question score and participation activities over time. Our study reveals participation patterns, showing the existence of prolific contributors: users who are active across both channels and are responsible for a large proportion of the answers, serving as a bridge of knowledge. The key contributions of this paper are: a characterization of knowledge artifacts that are exchanged by this community of practice; the reasons why users choose one channel over the other; and insights on the community participation patterns, which indicate an evolution of the community and a shift from knowledge creation to knowledge curation.

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Notes

  1. http://www.r-bloggers.com/r-is-the-fastest-growing-language-on-stackoverflow/

  2. https://www.r-project.org/

  3. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2017-top-programming-languages

  4. https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

  5. https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges

  6. In the third phase of our study, we extended the mined datasets up to September 2016

  7. http://stackexchange.com/sites

  8. http://stackoverflow.com/tags/r/synonyms

  9. Our scripts, sample data, and coded data are openly available at https://zenodo.org/record/831805

  10. https://github.com/dmgerman/unify-perl

  11. A copy of the survey is available at http://cagomezt.com/lime/index.php/857211?lang=en

  12. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/comment

  13. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3892033/r-why-this-doesnt-work-matrix-rounding-erro#comment4151921_3892033

  14. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/266053/is-it-ok-to-cross-post-a-question-between-non-stack-exchange-and-stack-exchange

  15. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/315293/answering-borderline-duplicate-questions

  16. There is a threat to validity for this result in the R-help data: Stack Overflow separates responses into comments and answers, however, R-help does not have this distinction. For R-help, we consider that any direct reply to an email is an answer; and we consider a reply to an answer to be a comment.

  17. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/501917/resources-for-learning-sas-if-you-already-familiar-with-r

  18. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4333171/arrange-elements-on-a-matrix-according-to-rowsums-short-apply-q

  19. http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Arrange-elements-on-a-matrix-according-to-rowSums-short-apply-Q-td3068744.html

  20. http://duncanlock.net/blog/2013/06/14/the-smart-guide-to-stack-overflow-zero-to-hero

  21. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1739442/whats-a-good-example-of-really-clean-and-clear-r-code-for-pedagogical-purpos

  22. http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/creating-an-equivalent-of-r-help-on-r-stackexchange-com-was-Re-Should-there-be-an-R-beginners-list-td4684587.html#a4684954

  23. https://www.javacodegeeks.com/2016/09/stopped-contributing-stackoverflow-not-declining.html

  24. https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/10/podcast-89-the-decline-of-stack-overflow-has-been-greatly-exaggerated/

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Cassandra Petrachenko for the editing support and valuable comments that contributed to this work. We also thank Lorena Castañeda for her assistance with the data collection and analysis processes. Finally, we thank the R community users that responded to our survey. This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

    Alexey Zagalsky, Daniel M. German, Margaret-Anne Storey, Carlos Gómez Teshima & Germán Poo-Caamaño

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  1. Alexey Zagalsky
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  2. Daniel M. German
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  3. Margaret-Anne Storey
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  4. Carlos Gómez Teshima
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  5. Germán Poo-Caamaño
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Correspondence to Alexey Zagalsky.

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Communicated by: Romain Robbes, Christian Bird, and Emily Hill

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Zagalsky, A., German, D.M., Storey, MA. et al. How the R community creates and curates knowledge: an extended study of stack overflow and mailing lists. Empir Software Eng 23, 953–986 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9536-y

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