Epistemic Evaluation of StackOverflow

What is Stack Overflow?

Created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008, Stack Overflow is a crowdsourcing site that involves questions and answers regarding programming. The website serves as a platform for users to ask and answer questions. It also allows users to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a fashion similar to Quora or Reddit. Users can earn reputation points called badges for receiving upvotes on questions and answers. Users unlock new privileges with an increase in reputation like the ability to vote, comment, and even edit other people’s posts. While quite similar to Yahoo! Answers, the distinguishing factor that differentiates Stack Overflow from Yahoo! Answers is its ability to close questions, preventing low quality questions from appearing on the site.

What are Epistemic Values?

In Internet Epistemology: Contributions of New Information Technologies to Scientific Research, Thagard discusses qualities of technology besides the usual ethical/economic consequences. By this, he means epistemic values: the values regarding knowledge, belief, and opinion. These epistemic virtues means to evaluate power, speed, fecundity, reliability, and efficiency. These values help us gain and develop knowledge within various forms of technology. New information technologies strive to incorporate all of these epistemic values into their products in an attempt to facilitate our access to information that we believe to be true. Not all technologies are able to successfully provide all of these values, so it is important that we know what we value most and are willing to sacrifice some of these other qualities.

Do These Values Apply to Stack Overflow?

As a computer science major, Stack Overflow is starting to become one of my most used sites. I want to see how my epistemic values are preserved in this crowdsourcing/Q&A site that is so prevalent in the programming world today.

Power

Power is defined as its ability to help people find true answers to the questions that interest them. Due to Stack Overflow’s search function, users are able to find any questions that they desire. If no one has asked the question that had, they can ask their own questions in hopes for another user to answer. However, the idea of the user getting a “true” answer is up for debate. Due to its natural crowdsourcing tendency, it’s difficult to say whether user provided answers are “true” answers. Also, programming answers are typically less about questions like “What is ___?” or “Is ___ ___?” and more about “How to ___?” and “What is wrong with ___?”. These questions typically have a wide range of answers that can all be potentially correct. Due to this gray area of answers, there’s no way to concretely say if answers are true or not. Speaking from personal experience, Stack Overflow has typically helped me get to the right answers, and thanks to its ability to search and ask questions, I always have what I’m looking for.

Speed

Speed is how quickly a source leads to true answers. As with most Q&A sites on the Internet, Stack Overflow generates answers using the search function in a matter of mere milliseconds. The search function allows the user to search by tags, authors, exact phrases, unanswered questions, and score. If the question you searched hasn’t been asked, you can submit your own question on the site. The speed of getting your own question answered widely varies. Personally, I’ve asked multiple questions on this site and the speed ranges from a couple of minutes to several weeks depending on the difficulty and how specific the question is. Due to the lack of consistency, it’s hard to comment about the speed of getting a question answered on Stack Overflow.

Fecundity

Thagard describes fecundity as, “its ability to lead to large numbers of true beliefs for many practitioners. This standard says that a practice should lead to truths for many people, as the printing press clearly did by making books available to far more people than previously had access to them.” Basically, it means how many people have access to such source. Thanks to the Internet, Stack Overflow is accessible to the public. There isn’t any subscription that you need to sign up for in order to use the site. Most users of Stack Overflow don’t even need to browse the site itself to use it because most programmers simply Google the question and Stack Overflow is usually the first site to pop up. While it’s accessible to everyone, you do need to create an account in order to ask a question. However, the sign-up process is incredibly quick and easy and doesn’t have any requirements such as age or status. In fact, you can also login using Google, GitHub, or Facebook so technically anyone with a Google account already has a Stack Overflow account. In short, Stack Overflow is open to the public and nothing is there to really stop anyone from using it.

Reliability

The reliability of a source is measured as the ratio of truths to a total number of beliefs fostered by the practice. This is an incredibly gray area topic due to its lack of concrete answers and its crowdsourced nature. It’s impossible to determine whether answers are true or just a mere belief, especially since many programming questions can have multiple different answers with a myriad of approaches. However, due to the upvote and badge system, it’s quite easy to see which answers are provided from reliable users and which answers are more of a question mark. Unfortunately, there’s no way to quantify the reliability of Stack Overflow to a specific ratio, given that it’s impossible to classify an answer as a truth.

Efficiency

Efficiency is defined as how well a source limits the cost of getting true answers. Due to Stack Overflow being on the Internet, it’s naturally going to be very efficient. Storing questions and answers onto the site cost relatively little compared to how often they are being searched. This compared to the printing press is significantly more efficient and more reliable as you can get ask questions tailored to your problem rather than looking up something general in a book.

Conclusion

By breaking down each component of Stack Overflow’s qualities and analyzing it using Thagard’s epistemic values, it is evident that this site, for the most part, is successful in upholding what Thagard believes a source to be epistemically significant. Using Stack Overflow, according to the five elements, is essential for programmers to gain somewhat true knowledge and belief. Without Stack Overflow, developers might not have a more powerful, faster, higher fecundity, more efficient, or more reliable source for their questions to be answered.

References

Vasilescu, Bogdan, et al. “StackOverflow and GitHub: Associations between Software Development and Crowdsourced Knowledge.” StackOverflow and GitHub: Associations between Software Development and Crowdsourced Knowledge — IEEE Conference Publication, IEEE, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6693332.

Watson, David, and Luciano Floridi. “Crowdsourced Science: Sociotechnical Epistemology in the e-Research Paradigm.” SpringerLink, Springer Netherlands, 26 Oct. 2016, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-016-1238-2.

Grimm, and Stephen R. “Epistemic Goals and Epistemic Values — Volume 77, Issue 3, November 2008.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 20 July 2016, https://www.pdcnet.org/ppr/content/ppr_2008_0077_0003_0725_0744.

“Stackoverflow.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic.” Alexa, https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com.

Tournoij, Martin. “Tired of Stack Overflow.” arp242, 22 Aug. 2019, https://arp242.net/stackoverflow.html.

Thagard, Paul. “Internet Epistemology: Contributions of New Information Technologies to Scientific Research .” Waterloo Cognitive Science Department, 1997, http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/Epistemology.html.