Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on SO evolve over time, for example when bugs in code snippets are fixed, code is updated to work with a more recent library version, or text surrounding a code snippet is edited for clarity. To be able to analyze how content on SO evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open dataset based on the official SO data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the version history of SO content at the level of whole posts and individual text or code blocks. The dataset also links SO content to other platforms by aggregating URLs from text blocks and by collecting links from GitHub files to SO posts. Our vision is that, in the future, researchers will use SOTorrent to investigate and understand the evolution of SO posts and their relation to other platforms such as GitHub.

The dataset is based on the official Stack Overflow data dump released 2017-12-01 (https://archive.org/details/stackexchange) and the Google BigQuery GitHub data set queried 2018-02-15 (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/github). Please read the license files (LICENSE.md) before using the dataset.