English

Scoring Popularity in GitHub

Social and Information Networks 2020-11-11 v1 Software Engineering

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.04865,
  title  = {Scoring Popularity in GitHub},
  author = {Abduljaleel Al-Rubaye and Gita Sukthankar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.04865},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Preliminary version to appear at 2020 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI-ISNA: Social Network Analysis, Social Media, & Mining)