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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 …
9mo 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 …
9mo 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 …
9mo 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 …
9mo 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 …
9mo ago
5 answers
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.
Hi and welcome to the site. :)
I think the idea of a canonical like the one you linked is great. A lot of newbies have too little understanding of their topic to identify common patterns. So they keep asking many trivial variations of the same handful of basic questions. People with even intermediate knowledge of the topic will usually have learned how to connect their instance of a problem to the general form and go from there, but of course everyone starts as a newbie. Because newbies cannot properly connect their problem to the big picture, it is useful and better for everyone to connect it with the big picture for them. I posted some thoughts along these lines here, but I did a worse job than you because I did not provide a good, concrete example. Your question is exactly the type of thing I was thinking of.
For https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62336082 in particular, I think the main issue there is that it's quite long. I think it would be better to create a separate question for each error (like How do I debug "cannot convert some value to data type" errors?) and then simply link to them from the main debugging question. This doesn't change any of the content, just reorganizes it and makes it easier to skim.
IMO this content would be very valuable for several reasons:
- It is useful and well written
- It solves a real problem
- It's about an interesting and non-trivial technology
0 comment threads
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 port it as is. In other words: it's valuable. Period.
- I like what Stephen said and concur: divide into multiple questions please, careful with the licenses.
- If you dislike that, push here for "Articles". There was an idea to have longer pieces of text, articles, which, I think, might be a better fit for the canonical in it's current form. I lean towards 1, as I think articles aren't yet done.
- I distrust SO-the-company. Therefore (and due to SEO) I'd say deletion works better. In light of lack of particular enthusiasm within Meta discussion, I'd say it should go through without much problems. Link to Codidact will probably be removed. Or worse, misconstrued and used as an argument against, in mod-strike negotiations. I hope that's NOT the case, but again, my trust in SO-the-company is low.
- Rules for deletion are nicely summarised here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that The relevant part is quoted below.
You can't delete your own question if it:
- has an answer which received at least one up vote (even if that answer has a net zero or negative score)
- has an accepted answer
- has multiple answers (even if there are no up votes)
- has an answer with an awarded bounty
- has at least one other question that is marked as a duplicate of your question
As an example, a question with this answer cannot be self-deleted: answer with the acceptance tick and upvote arrows lit up, and a net score of -3
You can't delete any of your own posts if you've already deleted five of your own posts on the same day (with exceptions).
Broader canonicals discussion
I'd like for them to appear organically, making yours an exception rather than the rule.
I'd like them to be linked to relevant tags. So, when I post a question, tag-wiki is checked and headers within are used as a suggestion box (with some slight matching). So I won't ask question if there's something there already.
I'd like for a question which was well-received throughout some time to earn the place among the canonical. So, if a question about Git does reach certain threshold over certain time, we add it (or it's semi-automatically added, with mods having the option to postpone or outright veto it).
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.
Perhaps the best way to deal with your SO content is to note in a comment that the canonical answer is no longer maintained by the canonical author, and / or maybe change your username to "username - no longer updating answers since dd/mm/yyyy" if that's your stance across the whole site, to get the message across. That way you protect your own reputation by highlighting that the content is being allowed to go stale and should no longer be relied on, but at the same time by allowing it to rot you do nothing to help SO (because frankly a deleted answer can be better than one that has been allowed to become horribly out of date, and if others follow a similar approach eventually the SO rot will start to show and their reputation will suffer.
2 comment threads