Broken External Links on Stack Overflow

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 used to show examples, e.g., code examples. 70% of the broken links in our sampled answers are used to provide supporting information, e.g., explaining a certain concept and describing a step to solve a problem. Only 1.67% of the posts with broken links are highlighted as such by viewers in the posts' comments. Only 5.8% of the posts with broken links removed the broken links. Viewers cannot fully rely on the vote scores to detect broken links, as broken links are common across posts with different vote scores. The websites that host resources that can be maintained by their users are referenced by broken links the most on Stack Overflow -- a prominent example of such websites is GitHub. The posts and comments related to the web technologies, i.e., JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery, are associated with more broken links. Based on our findings, we shed lights for future directions and provide recommendations for practitioners and researchers.