Broken External Links on Stack Overflow
Jiakun Liu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Haoxiang Zhang, Ying Zou, Ahmed E., Hassan, and Shanping Li

TL;DR
This study analyzes the prevalence and impact of broken external links on Stack Overflow, revealing that 14.2% are broken, mainly affecting code examples and explanations, with limited detection by users.
Contribution
The paper characterizes the nature and distribution of broken links on Stack Overflow and offers insights and recommendations for managing link decay.
Findings
14.2% of links are broken on Stack Overflow
Most broken links are used for examples and explanations
Broken links are common across posts with various vote scores
Abstract
Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow knowledge base substantially. However, with the rapid development of programming-related knowledge, many resources hosted on the Internet are not available anymore. Based on our analysis of the Stack Overflow data that was released on Jun. 2, 2019, 14.2% of the links on Stack Overflow are broken links. The broken links on Stack Overflow can obstruct viewers from obtaining desired programming-related knowledge, and potentially damage the reputation of the Stack Overflow as viewers might regard the posts with broken links as obsolete. In this paper, we characterize the broken links on Stack Overflow. 65% of the broken links in our sampled questions are…
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