Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
Comments on Do we want a wiki (or similar) alongside Q&A?
Parent
Do we want a wiki (or similar) alongside Q&A?
In addition to Q&A, Codidact supports another post type, article. Articles can be used for blog posts, wiki pages, and other resources. Articles, like questions, use tags, so searching for a tag would find them alongside questions. Articles, unlike questions, do not have answers, though they do have comments.
You can see articles in use on the Meta blog and on Cooking's recipes.
On Some Other site, the only options for sharing information about a topic are tag wikis (not very visible) and self-answered questions. There's nothing wrong with self-answered questions, but sometimes you have information you want to share and have to fabricate a question to support that answer, and that can be challenging.
Does this community want to have a category to hold articles, whether a wiki model or something else?
I'm not advocating one way or the other. What the community is doing now seems to be working fine; there's no need to change anything. New tools enable other options, so I want to make sure folks know about the option. If people are interested in pursuing it there's more discussion that should happen to work out the model (and name the category).
I think the framing of this question (and the prior discussion) is wrong, and I think that conditions have evolved since …
9mo ago
There are a few ways to understand "wiki". 1. Like wikipedia - an interlinked web of articles in a standardized forma …
9mo ago
I hear the walk-before-we-run argument. I think this would be a good thing to try once we reach running speed, though. …
3y ago
Please no. I had a bad experience of SO's failed and cancelled "Documentation" project. I raised the same concerns on th …
3y ago
I am not categorically opposed, but I currently don't see a use case for articles. For one, wikis already exist. What …
3y ago
Post
I hear the walk-before-we-run argument. I think this would be a good thing to try once we reach running speed, though.
Personally, I don't like self-answered questions; I think they're an awkward fit for Q&A sites. I'm primarily here to scratch my itch to help people—when I see a question that's relevant to my interests, only to realize that the asker never wanted help with the question at all, I feel a little let down. Spreading knowledge proactively is a noble goal and I don't want to discourage it, but I think there ought to be a more fit-for-purpose way to do it than the self-answer approach, which I think is kind of a hack.
The proper comparison with articles here would not be Wikipedia articles, IMO, but articles on GitHub wikis for specific projects. Wikipedia is a bad place for rando project documentation because it doesn't meet notability requirements. GitHub wikis are a good place to put that documentation, but GitHub issues are, in some projects' opinions, bad places to ask questions, and so you see a lot of README.md instructions asking users to consult both the wiki on GitHub and Some Other site when they have questions. Enabling articles would let projects define a one-stop shop for knowledge base articles and Q&A, which I think would make a certain amount of sense.
1 comment thread