Perhaps I’m misreading the true meaning behind «caring about content».

If we require that people are self-invested in their content down the road, we’re gonna run into problems once the original authors leave the site. This will happen; not everybody stays around indefinitely, for many reasons. One of the problems I have observed on SO, is how hard it can be to make people collaborate on the same piece of content. For instance, why would I want to edit somebody else’s answer, when I can post my own, which I’ll get my name on, and reputation for, instead of them? There needs to be ways to keep content updated, even when the original authors are gone. That said, of course, we do have multiple answers for a reason, simply when they are too different to fit into one and the same post.

I'm sorry I was unclear. I didn't mean I expect authors to care forever and maintain their own posts for years; people come and go, as you said, and this is why other people can edit too, or write better answers. I meant that if there is somebody who is here now who cares about the answer to a question (and that question is otherwise good, fits the community's scope, etc), then I don't think "but it's already on SO" is a reason not to ask it.

I understood that, but maybe I’m just reading too far into it, in considering it not just for the current situation, but future situation. I took a piece of text which was written in the context of now, and applied it to the future. Perhaps that was wrong.

Oh, I think I see. I meant to be expansive: if you think it's useful here, now or for the future (like canonicals), then don't let the fact that SO has a version of it stop you. We can make the Codidact copy better than theirs! :-)

Some reasons why someone might be personally invested in replicating a Stack Overflow question here (yes, all of them apply to me :) ):

• It's not actually clear which version of the question on Stack Overflow is "canonical"; there might be multiple highly-voted versions of essentially the same question or a set of related questions don't do a good job of splitting up the "problem space"

• The existing "canonical" sucks: it has too many answers, the answers are poorly factored, the question is improperly scoped (such that people who get their question closed as a duplicate complain about various irrelevant details), etc.

• It's hard to engage with the Stack Overflow community to improve the canonical, because people (especially the original authors) reject or roll back edits

• The canonical is hard to find because the necessary keywords overlap other questions and/or it drowns in a sea of lower-quality questions in the search results

• Codidact-specific markup tricks :)

It's hard to engage with the Stack Overflow community to improve the canonical, because people (especially the original authors) reject or roll back edits

How is this not going to become a problem of equal weight, at Codidact?

The other issues you mention have solutions that are easier to imagine, however, this one is harder to solve unless we force posts into becoming community wikis, or similar, and take away the original authors’ sole ownership of it. Reputation and ability progression (and possibly more), are linked to the ownership of posts, so solving that requires more. Shared ownership, with shared benefits (distributed) (ability progression, etc), is possible, but then we need ways to prevent fraud, which the Stack Overflow Documentation suffered from so badly it was eventually shut down.

When Codidact gets that large, one option communities could use (that SO doesn't have) is to collect well-developed canonicals into a new category and direct people there. You'd still be able to close new questions as duplicates across the category boundary. I imagine developing the Q&A in its usual place, and then when the community decides it's "baked" enough, moving it, preserving all attribution and editing ability.

I'm not saying communities should do this; I think it'll be a while before we have the scale problem. I'm just suggesting one way that communities could address the problem when it arises. There might be better ways too, either existing now or things we'll develop in the future. We, unlike SO, can improve the platform to meet community needs, which I think is pretty powerful.

Monica Cellio‭ I don’t really see how that solves the issue. Also, if this risks discouraging further edits, improvements and updates, the canonical may simply age out.

Andreas witnessed the end of the world today‭ My real concern is only about "canonical" questions - i.e. ones that are relatively important to the site, because they can preempt beginners' issues and close a lot of duplicates. If the question is moved into a new category, but can still be used to close duplicates in the main Q&A, presumably that new category could have its own rules and conventions for editing.

Ideally, content like this is already among the highest-quality on a given site, so the community shouldn't see the need for significant future editing. However, as I imagine things, a community might want such content to be collaboratively edited by default - perhaps to merge and reorganize answer content into a single summary. Of course, saying this is just kicking the can down the road, and there would still be a social problem; but in principle, it'd be one that has a standard, community-wide solution, so overly "possessive" answerers could be more easily overruled if the community deems that necessary.