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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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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" reaction to label your own answer the "official" one.
As an example of how this can be done, I once wrote this answer on SO. It needed some tweaks and updates, more sources added etc. At the same time, a lot of the other answers there were harmful noise, with the top-voted and accepted one making harmful recommendations to use a dangerous function.
So I wrote a self-answered Q&A Which functions in the C standard library must always be avoided? on Codidact and updated it a bit while at it.
Important: remember to always link to the original post so that it becomes clear that you are the author and not someone merely plagiarizing or "scraping". Similarly you could link from the SO post to the new Codidact post, saying "this post on SO is no longer maintained" etc.
Since I'm still active at SO, whenever this FAQ pops up I'll link to the Codidact post instead of the SO one, because it is more accurate and up to date.
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