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What categories could we benefit from having?
So far, existing Meta discussion seems to have at least hinted at the possibility of using separate categories here:
- To shuffle closed questions out of the way (globally for Codidact) (also)
- For debugging help requests (discussed in passing) (also)
- To recommend books or other resources
- To publish "reference" material on a topic without needing a question
I want to open the floor for brainstorming. Do all of these make as much sense to others as they do to me? What else might I be overlooking here?
1 answer
Categories should be used when the posting rules for certain types of question differ. For example a debugging question posted below Q&A should have a minimal, relevant example. Whereas a code review question should have the complete code as-is, without modification. This merits different categories, since they will have to be moderated separately.
Some thoughts about specific categories previously proposed:
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A "reference material"/"papers"/"articles" category could probably work, as was done on Electrical Engineering. However, I have posted lots of such here on this site as self-answered Q&A and it has mostly been well-received. So personally I don't see a need for such a category, but then I have some experience writing these things. Writing the question part in particular might admittedly be a needlessly artificial burden for someone who just wants to share some knowledge without having to write a (good) question first.
We could easily move already posted self-answered Q&A over to this new category if the community decides it wants one.
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Books & resource recommendations have been discussed before here. I stand by my conclusions there. The tl;dr being:
Since book recommendations are subjective by their nature, people's opinions about how to maintain the book list are also similarly subjective.
/ -- /
There may be a place for programming book recommendations here, but unless we can definitely guarantee quality, we shouldn't attempt it.The main concern being that with a limited user base, we will not have nearly enough domain experts to maintain such a category. I think at a minimum we would need some ~5 domain experts per major programming language (Java, C#, JavaScript, PHP, C, C++, Python... and so on) and the same for popular technologies such as Git, SNV, .NET, SQL + the major DBMS... and so on. I suspect that we don't have enough to fill even a single one of these.
So how would we go about guaranteeing sufficient quality ensured by enough domain experts? Some sort of user survey? And just because we happen to have some experts in the user base doesn't necessarily mean that they are also interested in maintaining recommendations.
We may be able to poach a sufficient amount of experts from Somewhere Else in at least a few of these technologies (the blank sheet aspect of starting over with recommendations and build something better than what's currently present Somewhere Else might appeal) but what about the rest? The strength and integrity of book recommendations comes from consensus by many experts, not just one expert (or worse, from a would-be expert).
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