Analysis of the Relationship between Editing Behaviors and Questions in Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a popular online platform for program on various professional levels to ask and answer questions on a wide range of topics in computer programming. It has attracted lots of research on the analysis of user behaviors, especially those related to the asked questions. In this paper, we propose an approach for analyzing the correlation between the editing behaviors and the questions asked in Stack Overflow. The approach is particularly established on the foundation of the analysis of a series of editing operations that may exist between the questions and answers. The approach is applied to analyze real-life Stack Overflow data, and the experimental results demonstrate that the more edited questions are likely to get more answers. It is also found that the editing of the body part and the editing of the tag part will affect the quality of the final question.