  Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for
software developers, providing a large amount of copyable code snippets. Like
other software artifacts, code on SO evolves over time, for example when bugs
are fixed or APIs are updated to the most recent version. To be able to analyze
how code and the surrounding text on SO evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open
dataset based on the official SO data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the
version history of SO content at the level of whole posts and individual text
and code blocks. It connects code snippets from SO posts to other platforms by
aggregating URLs from surrounding text blocks and comments, and by collecting
references from GitHub files to SO posts. Our vision is that researchers will
use SOTorrent to investigate and understand the evolution and maintenance of
code on SO and its relation to other platforms such as GitHub.
