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.
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.
2 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
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. ↩︎
Monica already gave a good explanation of the issues with imports, so I'll focus on the other approaches described.
About question selection
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.
In my view, this is absolutely wrong-headed. We should focus on basic questions, for two reasons:
-
Accessibility. There are way more newbies than experts out there. Newbies are the ones who are actually served by the Q&A existing, in large part. By definition, an question about an obscure problem is one that is useful to fewer people. (It's also important to note that difficulty level and obscurity are not the same thing.)
-
Quality. In many cases, questions about basic, fundamental tasks are simply too important to leave up to the newbies that need them answered. Because they lack the perspective of someone who already knows how to solve the problem, their attempt to explain the problem will often be clumsy to the point of being nigh unusable for Q&A. Newbies constantly misuse terminology, focus on irrelevant details, and fail to construct precise, clear specifications for how-to questions or properly reproducible and isolated examples (what is called an "MCVE" or "MRE" in programming circles) for why-do-I-get-this-result questions.
"Healthy communities by experts for experts" are the result of experts contacting each other more or less privately, through work channels, Discord etc. They rarely if ever expand beyond an easily predictable scope (e.g. the company whose employees co-founded it), and even the earliest attempts to do so usually run into major friction.
A healthy, public-facing community is - almost necessarily - for beginners. It just doesn't allow beginners to dictate or ignore policy.
Feel free to repeat Stack Overflow content
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.
This is the approach I endorse, and this is the point where I say "be the change you want to see in the world".
People who try to do this learn the hard way that writing good questions can be as hard or harder than answering them (and sometimes they learn that a really thorough answer requires a surprising amount of detail, which might be organized hierarchically - which might motivate re-thinking the question). But think about that for a second - if asking a really good question is that difficult for experts, why on Earth would we want to wait and let beginners attempt it, and then deal with the consequences? It's practically guaranteed that the organic approach will either cause harm in the long run (by breaking up the "problem space" awkwardly) or produce questions that need so much editing that they might as well have been written from scratch. (Some of the most important Stack Overflow canonicals I've seen have some truly embarrassing first revisions.)
0 comment threads
1 comment thread