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Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

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Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#21

If this gains traction I don't think we'll feel the benefits till a little later down the line. I've contributed a little to the Swift tag but the real advantages come from technologies that don't already have good documentation. I'm considering starting a tag for the enreco HTML -> PDF generator I use quite a lot as the official documentation isn't great.

> enreco HTML -> PDF generator

What is that? Googling it only brings up this comment thread.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#24
What I'm most worried about is the duplication between the canonical documentation of a project and the StackOverflow one.

As the author of an open-source project, I try my best to write a great documentation, and I would be a bit annoyed if people started to add examples to StackOverflow just to gain reputation there instead of contributing to the "official" one.

Also, SO is ranked way higher than the smaller-projects' documentation on search engines, pointing developers there. This can be problematic, for example, if a big release comes out and the SO documentation is behind.

The documentation for a lot of projects is really bad, I know, but I prefer a solution which doesn't disrupt the work of the mainteiners which writes good and extensive documentation.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#25

What I'm most worried about is the duplication between the canonical documentation of a project and the StackOverflow one. As the author of an open-source project, I try my best to write a great documentation, and I would be a bit annoyed if people started to add examples to StackOverflow just to gain reputation there instead of contributing to the "official" one. Also, SO is ranked way higher than the smaller-projec…

I think they should link back to the official documentation wherever it makes sense. They could even automatically import official docs into their system if the license permits that and a standard tool is used.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#26

What I'm most worried about is the duplication between the canonical documentation of a project and the StackOverflow one. As the author of an open-source project, I try my best to write a great documentation, and I would be a bit annoyed if people started to add examples to StackOverflow just to gain reputation there instead of contributing to the "official" one. Also, SO is ranked way higher than the smaller-projec…

There's one question I saw on Stack Overflow a while back that irritated me. If you copied and pasted the literal question directly into Google, the top hit was directly to the canonical documentation, where you could just scroll down to the clearly marked heading, and copy and paste the sample code and have it work straight away.

When I pointed this out, I was berated for not understanding that Stack Overflow is trying to become the canonical source. Sure enough, a few weeks later, the top hit on Google no longer pointed at the official documentation. It pointed at that same Stack Overflow question, with a half-assed answer that only gave a fraction of the information the real documentation did.

I appreciate Stack Overflow for its strengths, but it's harmful too. Being able to go directly to the canonical source of information for a product and do your job without anybody spoon-feeding everything to you is a vital developer skill, and I'm seeing more and more people who won't bother to lift a finger unless somebody does half their work for them. This project seems like it will push the developer community much further down this path.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#27
I hope they release a private enterprise version, like they have for StackOverflow[0]. I'd love to host this on-prem to document my company's codebase.

Anyone know of a similar solution that's available now?

[0] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16054/is-the-stack-e...

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#28

Really curious to see if this succeeds, fails like discourse or gets overrun by what I consider to be a major destructive faction of nitpicks and deletionists on SO.

In my experience, those nitpicks and deletionists only agro at things they don’t understand, like any sufficiently complex question or topic.

I think PHP is going to be documented really well, I anticipate hundreds of wonderful examples how to get a substring or format a date-time from MySQL query result.

I doubt there will be much content outside of that.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#29

What I'm most worried about is the duplication between the canonical documentation of a project and the StackOverflow one. As the author of an open-source project, I try my best to write a great documentation, and I would be a bit annoyed if people started to add examples to StackOverflow just to gain reputation there instead of contributing to the "official" one. Also, SO is ranked way higher than the smaller-projec…

There's one question I saw on Stack Overflow a while back that irritated me. If you copied and pasted the literal question directly into Google, the top hit was directly to the canonical documentation, where you could just scroll down to the clearly marked heading, and copy and paste the sample code and have it work straight away. When I pointed this out, I was berated for not understanding that Stack Overflow is try…

SO Q&A is definitely not trying to be the canonical source, and neither is Documentation. Whoever told you that was Wrong(TM).
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