@TravisJ We are planning a revamp of the homepage. It's frankly a terrible landing page at the moment. (It turns out the Q&A homepage isn't much used. Most people come to individual questions via Google. And people who use the site regularly tend to have other ways of finding questions than main landing page.)
Topic duplication. Could be useful, but it would need to emphasize better naming. For example, examine books on c#. Each book is not simply named c#, they are all different to differentiate the content, such as C# in depth, by that one guy ;). If topic naming was more akin or encouraged towards topic titling then perhaps duplication would be have less contention.
@JonEricson Oh, hm. I guess I have just gotten used to the whole fire hose thing. One of the appeals Stack Overflow had to me when I first graduated was that there were so many different topics (tags) related to programming. I wanted to learn about all of them so I tried to look at every question to see if I could either learn what was going on, or figure out a solution by learning.
@JonEricson - Perhaps a problem with Docs is how tightly coupled to tags it is. If you were to decouple the topics, by allowing each topic to have a set of tags as opposed to one tag having a set of topics, that would allow for a much more diverse landscape. Afterall, the only thing that tags are useful for is to see a flat list of topics. It seems that navigating top down has caused many complaints as a result.
@TravisJ Right. There's only one way that a topic called "Java Arrays" is going to turn out. It'd be really handy to have a topic like "Java Arrays for C++ programmers" or "Using multidimensional arrays" or even "Getting the length of an array". Small, focused topics would really help, I think.
Yeah, I agree. I think with the name "Java Arrays", it also sort of implies a monopoly. There is only one Java tag, and there is only one Java Arrays topic. So anyone wanting to contribute something related to arrays in java feels forced into that one space.
@TravisJ Yes. One of the ideas we are tossing around is allowing topics and even examples to be tagged the same way questions are. The huge pain point for doing that is it makes versioning much harder. (And versioning is already a bit of a pain.)
I think being able to show old ways of doing things alongside new ways is really useful:
I think that tags in Documentation could be similar to how they are now, except instead of landing on a massive list of topics, you would land on a community wiki (similar to normal tag wikis - this could even be migrated from the tag wiki to docs). This could retain version dates and remarks and whatnot. However, having versions inlined in examples is very noisy for languages which have gone through major iterations.
For example, using async in c# through the years has changed drastically and in rather stark departure at times. The tag system already supports versioning at Stack Overflow, and while that would presumably be removing some functionality in Docs, it would at least be replaced with a functionality that has been proven to work and is also community maintained (for example through meta oversight on existing tags).
In How do we want to handle questions with radically different answers for Drupal 7 (and lower) and Drupal 8 (and higher)?, we solicited thoughts on how we as a community want to handle the fact that some questions here can have radically different approaches depending on the version of Drupal be...
> we need to remember that people asking questions may not know tag policy
I think that was the large issue they had on Drupal. Sometimes users are a little overzealous with the whole pedantry thing.
That aside, tag versioning at SO (or versioning through the tag system) is certainly not perfect. However, it does at least facilitate some level of searching. It is nearly impossible to search for code snippets from different tag (language/framework) versions in Docs from my understanding.
Searching is definitely on the need to have list (as opposed to nice to have). I am not sure what advice I have on that matter though, except that in my opinion perhaps using elastic search is not the best tool for that job.
Documentation, like community wiki, suffers from tragedy of the commons - if everyone owns it, everyone wants to take advantage of it and no-one maintains it. Conversely - my answer is mine, I solely benefit from upvotes, I maintain it, I "protect" it from ill-advised edits, I curate it, if you will.
It, uh, is this place for grandstanding, erm, soapboxing, erm, uh topics n stuff. With examples! Yeah. And versioning. It will have it owl, and you can bacon on it.
I haven't been closely involved with the Documentation project. I've been watching it from afar with some interest, and I pitched in here on meta for a few weeks after the public beta rolled out, but outside of a few really frustrating discussions about reputation I haven't really been a part of ...
Start there, read for exactly one week. Follow all links.
Oh, ashok? He is actually in a good place with Docs. One really good thing that Docs does, is if you have some understanding of programming, and are switching languages, it provides several snippets and tidbits to get started at a decent clip.
If you literally know nothing about language x, it will get you into the drivers seat fairly quickly. And then it will let you out into the streets of Bangalore without a map.
But at least you're driving! :D Or scooting. One of the two, I haven't been to Bangalore recently.
I guess it depends on if you wander into the wrong part of town on accident (i.e. sql injection from trying to roll your own auth & auth), or into the best part of town (i.e. installing a proper OAuth implementation).
@JourneymanGeek So if you have a very clear and specific question it's best to ask it on SO. But if you kinda don't know how to get started or what choices you should make in terms of design or think you might be missing a useful feature in the language you are using, asking is going to leave you in a bad place.
We started with single digit phone numbers for only the most influential people. And now everyone has a phone, in the entire world. Even this guy on a boat in the middle of the Pacific.
@JourneymanGeek It's kinda amazing how much knowledge can be transferred via Q&A. But that doesn't mean we should only have this finely balanced hammer in our toolbox. I use screws sometimes too. ;-)
