Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta

Post by tedmiston » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 11:08 PM UTC

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…

Post by pcsanwald » Thu, Jul 21, 2016, 11:38 PM UTC

pietroalbini wrote: post #67

drusepth wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, this seems more like a problem with search algorithms than Stack Overflow. If the canonical documentation is more helpful to more people, it should rank higher. If Stack Overflow Documentation is more helpful, _it_ should rank higher. It doesn't hurt to try to create a resource that might end up being more useful to more people. But until it really is, it needs to be ranked as so.

My point is, why would you duplicate documentation both on the canonical source and in Stack Overflow? For example, Flask [1] has a great and complete documentation, but still someone is starting to duplicate it on SO Docs. Why are we wasting time duplicating things instead of improving what's already there? [1] http://flask.pocoo.org

Post by dc2 » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 12:10 AM UTC

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…

Post by bvirkler » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 12:42 AM UTC

pietroalbini wrote: post #67

drusepth wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, this seems more like a problem with search algorithms than Stack Overflow. If the canonical documentation is more helpful to more people, it should rank higher. If Stack Overflow Documentation is more helpful, _it_ should rank higher. It doesn't hurt to try to create a resource that might end up being more useful to more people. But until it really is, it needs to be ranked as so.

My point is, why would you duplicate documentation both on the canonical source and in Stack Overflow? For example, Flask [1] has a great and complete documentation, but still someone is starting to duplicate it on SO Docs. Why are we wasting time duplicating things instead of improving what's already there? [1] http://flask.pocoo.org

Post by 0xffff2 » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 1:23 AM UTC

krick wrote: post #72

I really don't want people to start using something like this instead of improving the official documentation. I hate the fact it probably cannot be helped. To "do the same thing for docs that we did for Q&A"? Yeah, except there just was no sane platform for Q&A before. And for docs there is, you know… the docs!