Fit or unfit

Abstract

Stack Overflow is widely regarded as the most popular Community driven Question Answering (CQA) website for programmers. Questions posted on Stack Overflow which are not related to programming topics, are marked as `closed' by experienced users and community moderators. A question can be `closed' for five reasons -- duplicate, off-topic, subjective, not a real question and too localized. In this work, we present the first study of `closed' questions on Stack Overflow. We download 4 years of publicly available data which contains 3.4 Million questions. We first analyze and characterize the complete set of 0.1 Million `closed' questions. Next, we use a machine learning framework and build a predictive model to identify a `closed' question at the time of question creation.