
Will StackOverflow Documentation Realize Its Lofty Goal? - ingve
http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/2016/08/stackoverflow-documentation.html
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johnwheeler
StackOverflow lost a lot of trust with me. It used to be _the_ goto place to
find answers to programming questions, but they must've gotten the incentives
wrong, or something, and it just took a long time to surface.

In my naive view, you can't post anything on there without it being
scrutinized to death. I don't know what the impetus is that brought this on.
Was it people gaming the system for reputation?

~~~
blakeyrat
I've never successfully had a question answered in StackOverflow. I have had
one question "answered" by a person who obviously didn't at all read the
question.

I think this is because the only people on that platform are the people who
love getting imaginary Internet Reputation Pointzzz next to their name, and
those people will never answer difficult questions because the same amount of
work could get a more points if applied to a dozen simple questions. And I
never ask a question until I'm truly stumped, i.e., it's difficult.

In theory, I could put a "bounty" on the question to get it answered, but
since I don't give a crap about Internet Pointzzz I don't bother spending
hours building up my points on easy questions just so when a difficult
question comes along I can spend those points to try and get other people to
answer it.

Anyway, it's just Wikipedia all over again. If you "gamify" a site, after a
few years, the only people left are the people who care about the Internet
Pointzzz, who have driven all the people who cared about the original mission
away. (In the case of Wikipedia, by edit wars, in case of StackOverflow by
voting to close literally everything.)

~~~
DanBC
> Anyway, it's just Wikipedia all over again.

I'm not a huge fan of either site, but Wikipedia is _considerably_ worse than
SE precisely because Wikipedia's meta stuff is out of control, and SE started
with the concept of "meta is death".

There's easily hundreds of thousands of words of meta-discussion about whether
to use n dash, m dash, hyphen or minus between words like "Mexican American
War".

They're both somewhat hostile to new users of the site.

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doublerebel
I personally don't see how open source authors would be incentivized to spend
time integrating their Github docs with a commercial, ad-based system like SO
Docs.

For closed source subjects that have few resources for examples, like Obj-C, I
could see a use.

However, many SO answers rapidly become outdated, especially in the less
popular subjects. And the more popular subjects have some really poor
questions and answers. Right now SO does a mediocre job of mediating the
outdated or misinformed answers that have sat, so I don't see how that will
change with SO Docs. In fact since docs are more taken as truth than random
internet answers, I imagine it could get much worse.

~~~
dbcurtis
A billion times yes. As a developer, I'm going to curate my documentation in
the same repo as my source code. And I want my contributors to file
documentation PR's to the canonical repo.

I see the whole SO Docs thing a transparent attempt to monetize advertising
revenue by thieving attention from the projects they purport to help. Time
spent improving the documentation on SO is time not spent improving the
canonical documentation curated by the project maintainers.

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MengerSponge
Has StackOverflow fixed the issue of software versioning and repeat questions?
More than once I've run into a question that was relevant for me, but was
marked as a duplicate, where the referenced original thread applied to an
earlier version of the software.

It's infuriating! I don't need to know how to solve that with Python 2.7... I
need to know why it's busted on 3.5!

~~~
dbcurtis
That's my experience as well. Also, the related problem of a question being
marked as duplicate when it is not a strict duplicate, but a corner-case that
the original answer is to shallow to explain.

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tarr11
Anecdata: I've visited SO over 200 times this month. [1]

I know many people are upset with moderation over there, but it works and
StackOverflow is more popular than ever. It's not a place to have long
ponderous discussions - they have always said this.

That's what Medium, Quora, blogs are for.

If you want to influence the community, than participate, earn enough points
and privileges, and be part of the discussion in Meta. [2]

[1]
[https://myactivity.google.com/item?q=stackoverflow.com](https://myactivity.google.com/item?q=stackoverflow.com)

[2] [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/)

~~~
dionidium
Their positions on the core tenets are religious in nature. You're not going
to change their minds on meta.

~~~
sklivvz1971
I disagree. I am one of the developers and we listen to meta all the time.

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akavel
After some initial thoughts and experimentation, I now look at the "SO
Documentation" name as somewhat misleading (if "Documentation" is interpreted
as "[Reference] Manuals"), and try to rename it in my mind as "StackOverflow
HOWTOs" (or "Guides"). Then it starts to make more sense to me: as a
collection of guides on how to work with various tools which have weird,
irregular, messy API/UI (which was probably more grown than designed). Ones
where a regular, exhaustive Reference Manual cannot be built along API/UI
boundaries, as the boundaries are too chaotic, so a classic Reference Manual
would be chaotic too. HOWTOs/Guides can then try to introduce some kind of
desperate order in such mess, by focusing on some conceptual topics, while
cross-cutting through the lines drawn in the API/UI.

Example tools for which I believe SO Docs can find success: vim, git, bash,
Linux, emacs, maybe Nix tools+library+NixOS

Example tools/languages for which I _(personally)_ believe SO Docs won't find
success: Go standard library, MSDN, PHP standard library.

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ceejayoz
I'm a big SO fan and user - 100k rep, they sent me a shirt, mug, and stickers
- but the Docs product baffles me. I couldn't make heads or tails of the
interface, the PHP docs are just duplicating (badly) the official docs, etc.

~~~
0xmohit
> the PHP docs are just duplicating (badly) the official docs

I'd be tempted to say that it's bound to happen.

It would be have been much better if the efforts were directed towards
improving documentation rather than building up a parallel system for
documenting a variety of things.

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greggman
I feel like SO docs biggest issue is it requires everyone to agree.

On SO q&a you can ask "how do you write hello world in bla". There will be
many answers. Those answers get votes. Almost anyone can post an answer if
they think they have a better one or can explain better.

On SO docs on the other hand, only one answer is allowed. This removes
opportunity and incentive to contribute and adds a kind of bureaucracy and all
kinds of issues with their point system that seems like it's going to lead to
turf wars and hurt feeling.

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gavinpc
Does anyone doubt that the real goal of "Documentation" is just page views?

I have nothing bad to say about SO as a Q&A site. I stopped answering years
ago, yet I've benefited from it easily ten times a day. And when I recently
asked my first question in years, on a _Saturday_ , I got a single, correct
answer from an expert ( _edit_ , I mean, the author of a published book on
SQL) within an hour.[0]

But the OP's question reminds me a little bit of how people talk about the US
Congress. How come these high achievers never accomplish what they went there
to do? Well, maybe they're extremely good at doing what they really intend.

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39056483/can-constant-
loo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39056483/can-constant-lookups-be-
done-efficiently-within-a-single-query)

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bluetwo
I had the same bump of excitement when I read the description of StackOverflow
Documentation, but was saddened quickly when I looked at what they produced
and how they were producing it.

If you want to create bad documentation, here is how you do it: Hire an intern
and have them describe each element, function, screen, button, etc of a
program.

If you want to create good documentation, here is how you do it: Hire an
instructional designer to define the audience, their objectives, the common
tasks, and then build your documentation around this information.

This effort seems to be taking the first approach, and might end up producing
documentation, but it won't be very good.

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wrexsoule
I used to contribute a lot to SO a few years back into a pretty niche tag, and
I've noticed the same trend which drove me out of participating. Still a
pretty good resource, but the number of opportunistic people who are there
just to get these silly points is too damn high.

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hasbroslasher
Will the question in the title make me click even though I know it's
deceptive? Damn, I just can't resist.

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WhitneyLand
So, its like Wikipedia with voting and ads?

