Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in isolation, and part of the evidence that they exist in a broader software documentation ecosystem is the common presence of hyperlinks to other documentation resources found in forum posts. With the goal of helping to improve the information diffusion between Stack Overflow and other documentation resources, we conducted a study to answer the question of how and why documentation is referenced in Stack Overflow threads. We sampled and classified 759 links from two different domains, regular expressions and Android development, to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the links' context and purpose, including attribution, awareness, and recommendations. We found that links on Stack Overflow serve a wide range of distinct purposes, ranging from citation links attributing content copied into Stack Overflow, over links clarifying concepts using Wikipedia pages, to recommendations of software components and resources for background reading. This purpose spectrum has major corollaries, including our observation that links to documentation resources are a reflection of the information needs typical to a technology domain. We contribute a framework and method to analyze the context and purpose of Stack Overflow links, a public dataset of annotated links, and a description of five major observations about linking practices on Stack Overflow. We further point to potential tool support to enhance the information diffusion between Stack Overflow and other documentation resources.

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Stack Overflow 上的上下文文档参考

软件工程是知识密集型的，需要软件开发人员不断地搜索知识，通常是在 Stack Overflow 等社区问答平台上。这种信息共享平台并不是孤立存在的，它们存在于更广泛的软件文档生态系统中的部分证据是论坛帖子中常见的指向其他文档资源的超链接。为了帮助改善 Stack Overflow 和其他文档资源之间的信息传播，我们进行了一项研究，以回答 Stack Overflow 线程中引用文档的方式和原因的问题。我们对来自正则表达式和 Android 开发两个不同领域的 759 个链接进行了采样和分类，以定性和定量地分析链接的上下文和目的，包括归因、意识和建议。我们发现 Stack Overflow 上的链接具有广泛的不同目的，从将内容复制到 Stack Overflow 的引用链接，到使用维基百科页面阐明概念的链接，再到推荐软件组件和资源以供背景阅读。这个目的范围有主要的推论，包括我们观察到文档资源的链接反映了技术领域典型的信息需求。我们提供了一个框架和方法来分析 Stack Overflow 链接的上下文和目的，一个带注释的链接的公共数据集，以及关于 Stack Overflow 上链接实践的五个主要观察结果的描述。