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Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

blog.stackoverflow.com

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Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#31

Post by Piskvorrr »

TylerH wrote: post #29
JimDabell wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Like Wikipedia, it strives to be a great first-order approximation (from where you'd browse over to the canonical sources). Unlike Wikipedia, it doesn't make this too clear, and I have met people claiming that SO intends to obsolete primary sources - a tragic misunderstanding.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#32

Post by allendoerfer »

I think a big problem is user motivation. On Q&A sites you get the reward to directly help someone and have a conversation. This is missing for documentation. I wonder if their gamification is enough to motivate people or whether they have to find a deeper human desire that they build into this and satisfy.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#33

Post by donny5 »

kyriakos wrote: post #8

Great idea I especially appreciate the fact that its done by example. A couple of things that bothered me are: 1. The UI needs some refinement. I was looking to find a topic to post about and from my 10 minute browse I realised that if I was meant to find information in this documentation it's really hard to find what you are looking for. After you drill down to a tag it feels "unstructured". Readthedocs layout feels…

#2 is actually implemented. Applicable versions are displayed on every page.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#34

Post by edgarvaldes »

Kiro wrote: post #21
JamesBaxter wrote: post #3

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.

Top result for me:

http://www.nrecosite.com/pdf_generator_net.aspx

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#35

Post by acjohnson55 »

JimDabell wrote: post #26
pietroalbini wrote: post #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-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…

To be fair, that best answer is totally editable by any user to be more informative and/or link to the canonical source of information. There are few projects whose docs have such low contribution friction, for better or worse. And unlike project-specific documentation, it comes in one basic format and set of norms.

I also don't think there's a problem of spoonfeeding information to developers. If a developer at Company X tries to solve all their problems via StackOverflow questions, waiting for someone to come save them, I'd have to assume that this would manifest as them being blocked all the time. At that point, it's up to their lead to teach them and hold them accountable for exercising other ways of resolving their problems, including RTFM.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#36

Post by lucb1e »

jbrooksuk wrote: post #4

Odd. Couldn't find blog.stackoverflow.com The Q&A site blog.stackoverflow.com doesn't seem to exist…yet. You can vote for it to be created through our democratic, community-driven process at area51.stackexchange.com, or see a complete directory of all our Q&A sites at stackexchange.com.

When I click the link, I get the blog post. When I go to blog.stackoverflow.com I get an overview of blogposts. What are you talking about?

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#37

Post by df07 »

jbrooksuk wrote: post #4

Odd. Couldn't find blog.stackoverflow.com The Q&A site blog.stackoverflow.com doesn't seem to exist…yet. You can vote for it to be created through our democratic, community-driven process at area51.stackexchange.com, or see a complete directory of all our Q&A sites at stackexchange.com.

The blog was down for a bit and falling through to the generic Stack Exchange network handler, which is what you saw. It should be working now.

Re: Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

#39

Post by lucb1e »

reitanqild wrote: post #23

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.

> a major destructive faction of nitpicks and deletionists on SO.

I've had my experience with them so I get where you're coming from, but you can't say StackOverflow isn't a great resource and perhaps in part because of them. I'm sure and am glad they will have their share in the documentation part as well.

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