Makoto

We were given a hammer and a screwdriver in the service of keeping crappy content off of the site. "Why exactly we use them" is a redundant question. "How exactly we use them" is not quite as redundant but can be teased out through focus groups of power users and moderators as opposed to surveys.

This may be the prime disconnect. The people who actually want to learn how to ask better questions do come to Meta and learn about what they did wrong. These are the rare kinds of askers who thought it'd be OK to dump some requirements on us, but got their question closed and felt like it was reasonable to not only ask why their question was closed, but what they could do in the future to improve it. The vast, vast majority of people...don't, or by the law of averages, shouldn't. Those are the requirement dumps, or the homework questions, or the people who want us to do their job.

The only tools we were given to stave this flood of users were the downvote and flag buttons. So, if we want to give users guidance on why their question wasn't met positively, we're only left with the options that the system provides us. To then think that the system is running a survey on what we really mean when we use the one or two buttons we have...I just feel like they should've done their own homework on this @BryanKrause before bundling it up as a survey at all. I feel like they would've preempted this exercise instead.

I suppose then, @BryanKrause, we'll just ignore the tooltip over the downvote arrow to help establish that. It's fine; I'm used to that convention by now. Lots of things are getting ignored.

Or they can be totally fair die with 6 on all six sides

@david It's super easy to find unfair 2 D6 dice

If it's a recent policy change, cool - I'll roll with that

@MetaAndrewT. I'm just patiently going to wait for a response to that one

Thanks!

@ɥʇǝS: There couldn't be any larger disconnect, IMO.

Validation from the community seems to be what I'm getting. I do recall that there was a lot of...silence...from the initial implementations of Docs.

From the perspective of the dev team, what is the biggest lesson learned from this project? I don't deny that there are lessons to be learned, but I'd like to know what was the biggest one as a result of it now being closed?

Then there's an even smaller subset there of people who feel confident in the docs they could author.

This means that there aren't many people around to write documentation for it to begin with.

For me right now, Docs would have helped me sift through incomplete and undetailed documentation on a platform I have to work on. However, I wonder if that is a two-edged sword; I've not heard of many people using this platform before (and Googling is a bit rough), so I can't expect others to really know about the software platform.

X is still a company in my scenario.

(I'm going through that right now with a very proprietary platform from a very public vendor.)

Others are using that tool but X hasn't written very good documentation for it, nor do they support it all that well. It's more common than you realize.

@ɥʇǝS: It would be the case that X hasn't written the documentation.

My question then would be, in an ideal world @JonEricson, what would the ultimate point of Docs encompass? Somewhere to find documentation for applications and libraries, or languages, or an amalgam of both?

A long time ago when Documentation has its own separate Meta, I had thought that the idea of Documentation could eventually encompass how to compile and configure the Linux kernel. Just have that kind of knowledge in one, nice-to-access place. But I'm not sure if that jived with the original vision of Documentation.

@JonEricson: That's good to hear.

On the plus side, it seems like the feedback and considerations are being taken well on board. Do we have a determination on the badge yet, since that proved to be somewhat controversial?

@hairboat: I haven't seen much noise from it, and I can't really say if things are going well or not. I don't see any major fallout behind reputation fluctuating - likely because I presume that you haven't done that yet.

@AlonEitan: It was like bikeshedding to a degree. That particular and now well-infamous Java arrays post is one of the reasons I wanted to ask for language tags to be outright removed from Documentation.

Yes. It's one of those pieces of inertia that is actually quite hard to get over, and without that, Documentation will have a very tough time surviving.

Things like specific benefits to bean wiring versus annotation wiring of Spring beans which were glossed over in official documentation but not really elaborated on.

s/knew how to write/was confident in writing

Personally I felt like I couldn't contribute well to Documentation because what I knew how to write was rudimentary, run-of-the-mill knowledge that could be found most anywhere else on the 'Net in other formats, and the kinds of things I wanted to seen written were tougher to find or tougher to verify.

I've got some feedback which I feel would make a good postmortem doc, highly informal and mostly floating around in my head, if we want to talk about its past at some point, too.

Personally, while I have received news of projects being shut down after coming back from vacation (and yes, that does hit hard), I do feel like shutting it down is the right choice. As far as it's going: I think that things have been relatively quiet in terms of its shutdown; I haven't heard of any real noise from it just yet.

php, android, javascript...take your pick

Fair enough

@Shog9: Would this take into account legacy burninate requests as well?

That seems practical.

It's not a privilege that should be given to just anybody.

25K? 30K?

Please do

I think that may be the missing tool.

I could get with that.

Arguing against those of us who do the curation dodges the main point - the content was poor.

Content moderation and curation doesn't really need to take into account the creator's feelings. If it's good, it gets treated well. If it's bad, it's often subject for removal.

It's fair, though.

For the sake of those who actually moderate, it's better to not comment since that drains a ton of energy from both parties.

@Muze - in all honesty when someone tries to strike up a conversation about why they were downvoted, it's actually highly counterproductive to the actual reason as to why the post was downvoted at all. More times than not, an OP in that context is looking for someone to blame/yell at in an effort to try and get the vote overturned.

Also @NicolBolas sorry about just sneaking in; I was content to be a fly on the wall for a bit...

It kinda starts with you - don't take votes personally.

The CoC codifies the site's general policy of "Be nice" - in the context of no offensive behavior or attacking of specific groups or demographics. Moderation of content is orthogonal to the goals of the CoC, and voting is a form of moderation, since that impacts what a user can do on the site.

It's tough to communicate that concept through since people believe votes are a referendum on themselves as a person, but that really isn't the case.

A downvoted question implies that the question is poor. It has no bearing on the user itself.