Scoring Popularity in GitHub

TL;DR

This paper investigates popularity metrics on GitHub, analyzing their relationships and introducing a weighted popularity score derived from various engagement indicators to better understand social dynamics on the platform.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of GitHub popularity measures and proposes a novel weighted popularity score combining multiple indicators.

Findings

Positive correlation between starring, forking, and watching metrics

WTPS effectively captures overall popularity trends

Weighted score improves popularity assessment accuracy

Abstract

Popularity and engagement are the currencies of social media platforms, serving as powerful reinforcement mechanisms to keep users online. Social coding platforms such as GitHub serve a dual purpose: they are practical tools that facilitate asynchronous, distributed collaborations between software developers while also supporting passive social media style interactions. There are several mechanisms for "liking" content on GitHub: 1) forking repositories to copy their content 2) watching repositories to be notified of updates and 3) starring to express approval. This paper presents a study of popularity in GitHub and examines the relationship between these three quantitative measures of popularity. We introduce a weight-based popularity score (WTPS) that is extracted from the history line of other popularity indicators.