Research on the Collaborative Mechanism of Project Robots in Online Knowledge Production Communities: An Analysis of GitHub

Bots are becoming more widely adopted in GitHub, with implications for online knowledge collaboration. It is necessary to study the extent of the impact of bots in online knowledge collaboration. A total of 843 projects with around 63125 aggregate data were acquired by crawling projects through GitHub API and filtering out projects that do not contain code or do not have any issues. Preliminary research found no correlation between the adoption of bots and the popularity of the project, while most of the literature support a positive correlation. But further classified observation according to the attributes of the bot, we found that projects with dedicated bots were more popular than projects with template bots. The study found that the adoption of dedicated bots for projects led to an increase in commit, fork, and issue count, which affected the addition, reorganization, and integration of knowledge collaboration. The study also found that projects with dedicated bots received more attention, with a positive correlation between fork count and star count, but no significant correlation between commit, issue count and star count. The impact of bots in online knowledge collaboration is still lacking in terms of adding and integrating knowledge.