In Stack Overflow (SO), a post consists of multiple components: title, question, answers, question tags, and comments. Developers can create any of these components and make changes, which we call `edits’. Edits are an important aspect of QA websites to ensure the quality and correctness of the texts. We performed multiple analyses on the revision history of twenty-three million SO posts from 2008 to 2023: edits’ frequency and intensity, different types of edits, the number of developers making the edits in SO posts, and the relationships among various types of SO edits. Through these analyses, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of developers’ content maintenance behaviors and lay the foundation for further research.

We observed several interesting phenomena. Developers are making multiple edits on different SO post components. A majority of the edits are made by a single developer. Edits on questions and answers have the highest frequency and intensity annually. The rates of edits for questions and answers are also exhibiting an increasing trend each year. By manually analyzing 1,000 SO post edits spanning 14 years, we observed 10 categories of reasons for editing an SO post. For questions and answers, the majority of the edits are on including additional details and improving the clarity, while for question tags, the majority of the edits are on adding more tags about the question. These observations highlight the potential for developing tools that could assist in creating high-quality posts from the outset, thereby reducing the need for future edits.