Welcome to Codidact Meta!
Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.
Comments on Dealing with questions "settled on" Stack Overflow
Parent
Dealing with questions "settled on" Stack Overflow
We are a late starter QA site, so we are disadvantaged vs. competitors like Stack Overflow. Namely, a lot of basic questions are already asked and answered there, and people are less likely to organically re-ask them here. For us to accumulate such basic/well-known questions and answers will take a very long time (if it ever happens).
That leaves us positioned to do well on obscure topics, but have poor coverage of basic ones. I wonder if this would undermine our value as a place of reference and learning to potential new users. In essence, wouldn't they say "if everything exists on SO, but only obscure things are covered in CD, I'd rather use SO even though it's not as good because at least it's comprehensive and I can reliably find answers to my question".
I've seen some organic efforts to counter this by CD users:
- Some people deliberately re-ask questions here, knowing that they already have an answer on SO. This is a good way to "catch up" but it's a lot of effort and currently there is not enough energy put into it by the community to handle this with sufficient coverage.
- There was an idea of automatically importing questions from SO, but it sounds like the admins don't want to do this.
- We could just focus on the obscure questions to attract mainly expert users. Once the site is a healthy community for questions by experts for experts, it would presumably begin to attract newbies who ask the basic questions as well.
But what are the feelings of the admin team? I like CD more than SO so I hope it does well. But this issue seems hard to solve individually. It would be a lot easier if there was some "official" strategy that us users could follow with more cohesion.
Post
Partial answer, which I hope to flesh out later (but probably won't have time today):
I hope that people will ask questions here, regardless of whether they've been asked elsewhere, when someone here cares about the topic.[1] This can be because you have a question, but it can also be because you have an answer -- you've just wrestled with this yourself, or helped a coworker, or posted a good answer on a forum that you'd like to bring in. If you have a question, ask it. If you have an answer to a question we don't yet have, please consider asking it and sharing that answer -- or, on communities that use articles, maybe you can do that instead. Either way, if you have knowledge you want to share, please do share it here. We're not all experts, and experts aren't experts in everything, so there is definitely a place for more basic questions.
-
This was the problem with the bulk imports we did early on: we brought in a lot of Q&A that nobody here actually cared about, so it wasn't curated or maintained or, often, even claimed. A question or answer that someone is invested in is a different matter. ↩︎
1 comment thread