Update Request Comments in Stack Overflow Answer Posts

Comments play an important role in updating Stack Overflow (SO) posts. They are used to point out a problem (e.g., obsolete answer and buggy code) in a SO answer or ask for more details about a proposed answer. We refer to this type of comment as update request comments (URCs), which may trigger an update to the answer post and thus improve its quality. We manually analyzed a set of 384 sampled SO answer posts and their associated 1,221 comments to investigate the prevalence of URCs and how URCs are addressed. We have provided three level of annotation: 1- If it is a URC, 2- For URCs, where is it addressed, i.e., in the next comments, in the post body, or both. 3- For URCs that are addressed by the following comments, which comment addresses it.