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Comments on To transfer, or not to, that is the question: whether 'tis nobler to let it stay or to take arms against Stack Overflow's dominance of FAQ canonicals
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To transfer, or not to, that is the question: whether 'tis nobler to let it stay or to take arms against Stack Overflow's dominance of FAQ canonicals
Some of you may know me from Stack Overflow or the broader network. In light of recent actions by the company, I finally decided to move over to Codidact. I am a subject matter expert on Google Apps Script (among other fields) and would like to move my canonical on extremely common errors developers encounter in its entirety.
As of now, the canonical is slowly rotting away there due to the split in opinion on what to do with it, cycling between closure and reopen with little incentive for me to keep it up to date or rekindle the discussion (especially now).
The question I have regarding the move consists of a couple of tightly coupled issues I would like to know the community's stance on before making the decision so as I know how to act:
- Does the community feel the transferred content will be of enough value to it to warrant one?
- Would the canonical be good as is (with some updates) or would it be better to split it into several self-answered canonicals?
- Would it make more sense to make it an article (unfortunately, I am not sure if articles are enabled for the community in the first place)?1
I am aware of the Strategy to migrate meaningful content from Stack Overflow discussion which seems to have a conclusion that original content is preferred (for obvious reasons), so I have to note that my intention is to delete2 the Q&A there and do an extensive overhaul should the canonical be accepted.
With the personal concerns outlined, I would like this Q&A to serve as a basis for a broader discussion on how the community prefers such content to be transferred over (if at all, but from the discussions I've seen, it seems to be generally welcomed).
1 This issue stems from the Asking and answering FAQ style questions discussion and Monica Cellio's answer specifically.
2 It's been suggested in an outside channel that in case of the move it might be more beneficial to keep the original with a note that the up-to-date content can be found here, so that's another issue I would like to get input from the community.
It would be much better split into separate questions. - Users have to scroll, ctrl-f search, or wade through a lot …
10mo ago
Hi and welcome to the site. :) I think the idea of a canonical like the one you linked is great. A lot of newbies hav …
10mo ago
You are a thoughtful person, aren't you? /me bows in thanks I for one think it would be valuable, even if you were to …
10mo ago
I would recommend to post it anew here as a self-answered Q&A and update it if needed. You can use the "works for me" re …
10mo ago
Perhaps the best way to deal with your SO content is to note in a comment that the canonical answer is no longer maintai …
10mo ago
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It would be much better split into separate questions.
- Users have to scroll, ctrl-f search, or wade through a lot of info that irrelevant to their problem to get to the section that helps them.
- From a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint, you want to create several pages to rank better for searches for different problems.
- When people ask these basic questions, it makes it much easier to close exact duplicates or link to what is helpful to them.
- You have created enough content to easily support many pages.
I'd split it up into the following questions:
- TypeError: Cannot read property
- Cannot convert some value to data type
- Cannot call Service and method name from this context
- Cannot find method Method name here
- Lacking permission to perform that action
- ReferenceError: service name is not defined
- The script completed but did not return anything
- We're sorry, a server error occurred. Please wait a bit and try again.
- Syntax error without apparent issues
- Quota-related errors
- The number of rows in the range must be at least 1
- Error: “Reference does not exist”
- The number of rows or cells in the data does not match the number of rows or cells in the range
- The coordinates of the range are outside the dimensions of the sheet.
- Exception: You can't create a filter in a sheet that already has a filter
- Attribute provided with no value: url
I'd recommend rephrasing each as a question in the form of "How do I deal with X in Google Apps Script?"
Your desire to maintain this content here makes me feel that it would be worth importing it. Another reason to do so would be if you would tend to link to this content from other questions that get asked here. In that case, it would make a lot of sense not to have to link to SO.
If you do import this content, you'd want to make sure that you don't violate content licenses when you do so. If it is 100% your own content, I believe you can republish it anywhere as you see fit. However, if anybody else has made edits to it and you take that version, you need to comply with the creative commons license. You'd need to link back to the original on SO, name the authors and link to their profiles.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be deleted at SO to get copied to here. There can be duplicated content between sites as long as it is relatively little compared to the total amount of content. You want at least 50% original content. I'd make sure that there are at least 20 questions about Google Apps Script here before creating this many canonical questions on the topic. That may mean that you should ask some yourself.
In any case, you may or may not be able to delete this content on SO. Even though you wrote it, it isn't always yours to delete. SO may see an attempt to do so as self-defacement and restore the content.
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