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
Please no. I had a bad experience of SO's failed and cancelled "Documentation" project. I raised the same concerns on the Electronics site here. I'll quote that post:
The worst that can happen is something similar to SO's failed "Documentation project" a couple of years ago, where users were to write documentation and examples of misc programming-related topics. These ended up in a separate place at the site - a category if you will. There was no clear structure for how to organize these articles - anyone could write one, edit one etc. You could provide feedback to specific articles. What happened was this:
It was rather unclear and subjective what problem "Documentation" was supposed to solve in the first place. (Wikipedia 2?) Documentation pages ended up all over the place, broad and arbitrary. It was impossible to search through it looking for a specific topic. Everyone and their mother felt the urge to write these posts, meaning that the overall quality ended up very low. The domain experts who wrote good articles had them drown in floods of crap. Duplicates and overlapping topics happened frequently, with no easy way to resolve them.
And then there was actually a peer review system in place + you could leave comments etc, but it wasn't nearly enough. The whole project collapsed under the weight of crappy, chaotic articles.
Something similar to SO Documentation must be avoided. Then the question is - how do you do that, on an open Q&A site where everyone is (and should be) allowed to post, regardless of knowledge level. And how do you provide structure and guidelines for what the papers must look like, how they are categorized and so on.
The above concerns are valid for a large, active and healthy community, which Software Development is not. It is currently struggling with lack of content, lack of scope, lack of users and lack of domain experts. There are many better and far more important things we could focus on, like coming up with a community consensus for on-topic and off-topic.
Basically, we need to learn our ABCs before running off to write encyclopaedias.
1 comment thread