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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.

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Meta Do we want a wiki (or similar) alongside Q&A?

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 ...

posted 4y ago by Lundin‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Lundin‭ · 2020-09-24T07:04:28Z (about 4 years ago)
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](https://electrical.codidact.com/questions/276570#answer-276602). 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.