{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,16]],"date-time":"2026-04-16T14:44:29Z","timestamp":1776350669082,"version":"3.51.2"},"reference-count":25,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2018,3,10]],"date-time":"2018-03-10T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1520640000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Future Internet"],"abstract":"<jats:p>In recent years, software developers have started to appropriate GitHub repositories to curate resources, in order to systematically select, evaluate, and organize existing artifacts for preservation and future use. Curation behaviors in social media sites, such as users\u2019 experiences to curate tweets from Twitter and pins on Pinterest, are well documented. However, GitHub, as a social coding platform, presents a new context for this activity, raising questions about the nature of curation on this task-driven online work site. To explore and understand curation on GitHub, we compared and contrasted curation repositories with software repositories using activity logs and analyzed the content of popular curation repositories. Our results show that: (1) curation repositories have become a favorite category of repositories in GitHub; (2) curation repositories leverage collaborative features and practices native to GitHub in new ways; (3) curation repositories collect and preserve high-quality resources for the software developers\u2019 community. Our results suggest that curation is becoming increasingly important to the software developers\u2019 community, and current practices can be better supported with tools designed specifically for curation.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/fi10030029","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,3,12]],"date-time":"2018-03-12T13:13:48Z","timestamp":1520860428000},"page":"29","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":6,"title":["Understanding How GitHub Supports Curation Repositories"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"10","author":[{"given":"Yu","family":"Wu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7458-6003","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jessica","family":"Kropczynski","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Technology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0002, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Raquel","family":"Prates","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG 31270-901, Brazil"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5189-337X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"John","family":"Carroll","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,3,10]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Dabbish, L., Stuart, C., Tsay, J., and Herbsleb, J. (2012, January 11\u201315). Social coding in GitHub: Transparency and collaboration in an open software repository. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, WA, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/2145204.2145396"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Marlow, J., Dabbish, L., and Herbsleb, J. (2013, January 23\u201327). Impression formation in online peer production: Activity traces and personal profiles in GitHub. Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, San Antonio, TX, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/2441776.2441792"},{"key":"ref_3","unstructured":"Wu, Y., Wang, N., and Carroll, J.M. (2017). RepoHunter: Supporting Curation Repositories on GitHub, iSchools. iConference 2017 Proceedings."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"e134","DOI":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.134","article-title":"The appropriation of GitHub for curation","volume":"3","author":"Wu","year":"2017","journal-title":"PeerJ Comput. Sci."},{"key":"ref_5","unstructured":"Duh, K., Hirao, T., Kimura, A., Ishiguro, K., Iwata, T., and Yeung, C.-M.A. (2012, January 4\u20137). Creating Stories: Social Curation of Twitter Messages. Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Dublin, Spain."},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"Zhong, C., Shah, S., Sundaravadivelan, K., and Sastry, N. (2013, January 8\u201311). Sharing the Loves: Understanding the How and Why of Online Content Curation. Proceedings of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Cambridge, MA, USA."},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"McDonald, N., and Goggins, S. (May, January 27). Performance and participation in open source software on GitHub. Proceedings of the CHI\u201913 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paris, France."},{"key":"ref_8","unstructured":"Tsay, J., Dabbish, L., and Herbsleb, J. (7, January 31). Influence of social and technical factors for evaluating contribution in GitHub. Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, Hyderabad, India."},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Chang, S., Kumar, V., Gilbert, E., and Terveen, L.G. (2014, January 15\u201319). Specialization, homophily, and gender in a social curation site: Findings from Pinterest. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, Baltimore, MD, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/2531602.2531660"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Lima, A., Rossi, L., and Musolesi, M. (2014, January 1\u20134). Coding Together at Scale: GitHub as a Collaborative Social Network. Proceedings of the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.","DOI":"10.1609\/icwsm.v8i1.14552"},{"key":"ref_11","first-page":"1092","article-title":"Supporting content curation communities: The case of the Encyclopedia of Life","volume":"63","author":"Rotman","year":"2012","journal-title":"ASIST"},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Matthews, T., Whittaker, S., Badenes, H., and Smith, B. (2014, January 15\u201319). Beyond end user content to collaborative knowledge mapping: Interrelations among community social tools. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, Baltimore, MD, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/2531602.2531694"},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3219","DOI":"10.1007\/s10664-017-9512-6","article-title":"Curating GitHub for engineered software projects","volume":"22","author":"Munaiah","year":"2017","journal-title":"Empir. Softw. Eng."},{"key":"ref_14","unstructured":"Kalliamvakou, E., Gousios, G., Blincoe, K., Singer, L., German, D.M., and Damian, D. (June, January 31). The promises and perils of mining github. Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, Hyderabad, India."},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wu, Y., Kropczynski, J., Shih, P.C., and Carroll, J.M. (2014, January 15\u201319). Exploring the ecosystem of software developers on GitHub and other platforms. Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, Baltimore, MD, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/2556420.2556483"},{"key":"ref_16","unstructured":"Wu, Y., Kropczynski, J., and Carroll, J.M. (2015). Making Big Data Transparent to the Software Developers\u2019 Community. Big Data: Algorithms, Analytics, and Applications, Chapman and Hall\/CRC."},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Strauss, A.L. (1987). Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists, Cambridge University Press.","DOI":"10.1017\/CBO9780511557842"},{"key":"ref_18","unstructured":"Lacey, A., and Luff, D. (2001). Qualitative Data Analysis, Trent Focus."},{"key":"ref_19","unstructured":"Mockus, A., Nagappan, M., and Hassan, A.E. (2013, January 18\u201326). Statistics in software engineering: Pitfalls and good practices. Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering, San Francisco, CA, USA."},{"key":"ref_20","first-page":"65","article-title":"A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure","volume":"6","author":"Holm","year":"1979","journal-title":"Scand. J. Stat."},{"key":"ref_21","unstructured":"Peterson, K. (2017, November 05). The Github Open Source Development Process. Available online: http:\/\/kevinp.me\/github-process-research\/github-process-research.pdf."},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Singer, L., Figueira Filho, F., Cleary, B., Treude, C., Storey, M.A., and Schneider, K. (2013, January 23\u201327). Mutual assessment in the social programmer ecosystem: An empirical investigation of developer profile aggregators. Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, San Antonio, TX, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/2441776.2441791"},{"key":"ref_23","unstructured":"Storey, M.A., Singer, L., Cleary, B., Figueira Filho, F., and Zagalsky, A. (June, January 31). The (r) evolution of social media in software engineering. Proceedings of the on Future of Software Engineering, Hyderabad, India."},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"185","DOI":"10.1109\/TSE.2016.2584053","article-title":"How social and communication channels shape and challenge a participatory culture in software development","volume":"43","author":"Storey","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng."},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cha, M., Kwak, H., Rodriguez, P., Ahn, Y.-Y., and Moon, S. (2007, January 24\u201326). I tube, you tube, everybody tubes: Analyzing the world\u2019s largest user generated content video system. Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement, San Diego, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/1298306.1298309"}],"container-title":["Future Internet"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-5903\/10\/3\/29\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T14:56:31Z","timestamp":1760194591000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-5903\/10\/3\/29"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2018,3,10]]},"references-count":25,"journal-issue":{"issue":"3","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,3]]}},"alternative-id":["fi10030029"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/fi10030029","relation":{},"ISSN":["1999-5903"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1999-5903","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2018,3,10]]}}}