  GitHub's issue reports provide developers with valuable information that is
essential to the evolution of a software development project. Contributors can
use these reports to perform software engineering tasks like submitting bugs,
requesting features, and collaborating on ideas. In the initial versions of
issue reports, there was no standard way of using them. As a result, the
quality of issue reports varied widely. To improve the quality of issue
reports, GitHub introduced issue report templates (IRTs), which pre-fill issue
descriptions when a new issue is opened. An IRT usually contains greeting
contributors, describing project guidelines, and collecting relevant
information. However, despite of effectiveness of this feature which was
introduced in 2016, only nearly 5% of GitHub repositories (with more than 10
stars) utilize it. There are currently few articles on IRTs, and the available
ones only consider a small number of repositories. In this work, we introduce
GIRT-Data, the first and largest dataset of IRTs in both YAML and Markdown
format. This dataset and its corresponding open-source crawler tool are
intended to support research in this area and to encourage more developers to
use IRTs in their repositories. The stable version of the dataset contains
1,084,300 repositories and 50,032 of them support IRTs. The stable version of
the dataset and crawler is available here:
https://github.com/kargaranamir/girt-data
