This is just a product advert loosely dressed as a research article. It also has serious problems with the way how all the projects on GitHub are treated as equal.
The reason why ~3/4 GitHub projects only have 1 contributor is because a lot of people use Github for personal projects and/or as a portfolio for recruitment. So lumping them in together with all the open source projects that do have a community massively skews the results to the point of rendering them meaningless.
If we're going to talk about "at risk" projects hosted on GitHub then I'd be far more interested to know about the size of communities for any project that has multiple contributors. Or better yet, the truck factor for a subset of projects picked based on their appearance in the wild.
I'm assuming the poster has something to do with this project because they've submitted links related to it 21 times in the past 26 days, many of them duplicates.
The reason why ~3/4 GitHub projects only have 1 contributor is because a lot of people use Github for personal projects and/or as a portfolio for recruitment. So lumping them in together with all the open source projects that do have a community massively skews the results to the point of rendering them meaningless.
If we're going to talk about "at risk" projects hosted on GitHub then I'd be far more interested to know about the size of communities for any project that has multiple contributors. Or better yet, the truck factor for a subset of projects picked based on their appearance in the wild.