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Normally Kevin does these updates, but I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about how Documentation is doing from my perspective as a community manager. For the last 3 years or so, building communities of specialists has been my specialty. In my experience, communities on Stack Exchange have similar lifecycles:

  1. A new topic is introduced, a bunch of early adopters get excited about it and the first few days feel like a runaway train hurtling up and to the right.

  2. Reality begins to set in.The community is losing momentum. Folks wander off to do something else. Excitement dissipates and more people start looking for the exits.

  3. One of two things happen next: either the community slows to a virtual halt, or a handful of dedicated users get down to the real work of building a community.

As Shog9 showed, we passed the first stage months ago.

What's happened since launch?

Most of the work in a product's beta period aims to build the framework of community. For Stack Overflow Q&A, that framework consisted of questions, answers, voting, reputation, privileges (especially editing), curation and lightweight commenting. Those systems working in concert enable "a bunch of amateurs muddling along trying to do things together". Since Q&A is a resource most programmers use daily, we sometimes forget the struggle required to build the underlying software.

2016 has been about discovering and building the systems needed for user-contributed, example-first, Stack Overflow-integrated Documentation. Much of that work involves creating and testing hypotheses with actual users. It isn't quite science. But the critical element has always been your feedback — expressed explicitly on meta and implicitly via your actions.

While reputation seemed to work in the confined space of a private beta, it was abundantly clear at launch the reputation system didn't work. So we changed it. Twice. There's every chance we'll tweak it again, but the philosophy of rewarding work on Documentation roughly at the same rate as Q&A will remain. Currently, the median Documentation contributor has earned 7 points of reputation (up from 6 in September) compared to 10 points for the median outside of Docs. Since launch, less than 1% of Stack Overflow reputation has come from Documentation, which roughly coincides with activity. It's not a perfect system, but it seems reasonably consistent with the rest of Stack Overflow at the moment.

Unlike questions and answers, most contributions to Documentation are subject to review. Initially, we hoped that people would watch the tags they were interested in and that reviews would happen organically. We were wrong. After adding a global review queue (with 2.3k items!), we (re)discovered that some people just love to make tasks go away. So we added audits and review bans. It also seemed reasonable to give experienced users more influence on the queue, so we gave reviews from high-reputation users and silver tag badge holders more weight.

The public launch revealed bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. In fact the feedback has been a bit overwhelming. Many of the changes made (or planned) since beta have started in meta: reputation changes, review queue, rejection reasons, plagiarism warnings, improvement request refactoring, and a discussion area for example. We've done a lot in 2016 considering our team consists of 3 developers, a designer, and me, the resident cheerleader. It's inevitable that some important feature requests and bugs haven't been implemented. We'll be onboarding a dedicated product manager soon, who will help us prioritize future work. Kevin has done a solid job in the role, but he's been stretched too thin for too long.

What's next?

We aren't quite ready to roll out the final major piece of the system, which is a method of discussing changes and keeping track of those decisions. There has to be some way for people to talk about their policies and practices, and so we put a fair amount of effort in the R&D stage of the new "discussion" tab. I have interviewed a number of people who were given an early view of the static prototype. Those user tests revealed decisions we made that were less logical than we thought. This sort of feature is easy to get wrong, but I think we are on the right track. As with everything else, the real test will come when the feature is publicly available, so we’ll be ready to iterate on that as well.

Just this week, the executive team gave us a key metric for measuring success in the coming year: user growth. Obviously there’s a business reason for that goal, but it serendipitously benefits the quality of Documentation as well. As Eric Raymond notes, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Similarly, the more people who use Documentation to understand their code, learn a new feature or even answer questions on Stack Overflow, the more reliable the content will become.

There are a number of levers we can pull to give Documentation more pageviews. But we've been holding off on doing those things until the system for participating is solid. In large part it means handling feedback about particular Topics and Examples. Sometimes it's enough to say "this is confusing". More often, a user will need room to explain exactly what is confusing and talk about what changes might improve the situation. Meanwhile, it's been difficult for people who understand the system to guide those who don't. Meta is no substitute for comments right next to the content itself, so adding more eyeballs won't help until that piece of the puzzle is in place.

It's no secret we've been looking to Wikipedia for inspiration. Benjamin Mako Hill studied eight online encyclopedias and concluded:

Wikipedia offered low transaction costs to participation, and it de-emphasized the social ownership of content. Editing Wikipedia is easy, and instant, and virtually commitment-free. “You can come along and do a drive-by edit and never make a contribution again,” Hill pointed out. And the fact that it’s difficult to tell who wrote an article, or who edited it — rather than discouraging contribution, as you might assume — actually encouraged contributions, Hill found. “Low textual ownership resulted in more collaboration,” he put it.

We've resisted adding restrictions on new-user participation because Stack Overflow is built on "little tiny pieces of information". Even to this day, many good answers are given by people who don't care about Stack Overflow, but do care about some language feature, correcting misinformation or whatnot. The long-term quality of Documentation will depend on corrections, additions and clarifications from the people trying to use it.

With the software skeleton nearing completion, the real work of building a community is just beginning. On behalf of everyone on the Docs team, thank you for all of your help and advice in 2016; onward to 2017!

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    One piece of advice I'd like to offer. The home page of documentation (That is clicking the documentation item in SO) is not welcoming. It needs to drive users in. When I see that page it irks me...there is so much potential to be had and its not being taken advantage of. It could be as simple as the "today in wikipedia history page": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:On_this_day/Today Also look into faceted search and ways to engage the community. Currently it is not there. You could come up with some dynamic content based on tags I admire...Such and such added this topic..
    – JonH
    Dec 20 '16 at 20:30
  • 8
    @JonH For sure. We've discussed some of the things we'd like to do with the landing page that's not just "tiles for days", and it's definitely on the list of things we'll be exploring in detail in the coming year.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Dec 20 '16 at 20:31
  • 18
    The use of Wikipedia as a model is somewhat troubling. On one hand, each Wikipedia topic aims to be comprehensive as possible within the confines of a single page, while Documentation does not aim to duplicate existing documentation if it is of high quality. On the other hand, Documentation deals with a narrower range of topics, and with topics that have a generally more formal logic; which suggests that Documentation needs a higher entry bar than Wikipedia.
    – Zev Spitz
    Dec 20 '16 at 20:35
  • 13
    @JonH: I've been envying the WIkipedia Main Page a lot lately and not just for Docs. It seems to me the endless, unstoppable stream of questions serves mostly to remind us that there is an endless, unstoppable stream of questions. It would really be lovely to give browsers (as opposed to people arriving via search) something more engaging. It also seems very doable in a short period of time. Dec 20 '16 at 20:37
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    Is anything being done to help ensure accuracy? I keep a pretty close eye on the Javascript section and I can't tell you how many times new users have contributed something that falls somewhere between misleading and outright wrong. Personally, while I have benefited from the reputation, I think that newer users are mostly interested in getting the reputation which leads me to distrust anything written in Docs. As it stands, I never see myself consulting Docs for information.
    – Mike Cluck
    Dec 20 '16 at 22:40
  • 36
    @JonEricson I do but I'm only one man fighting a sea of inaccuracy.
    – Mike Cluck
    Dec 20 '16 at 22:45
  • 12
    @KevinB I suppose that's true. If Docs is aimed at newer programmers then right now I feel like it's the blind leading the blind.
    – Mike Cluck
    Dec 20 '16 at 22:47
  • 9
    @MikeC: I think one of the major uses for Docs for experienced people is as a replacement for canonical answers, since it's part of SO. If/when Docs becomes good enough, it would be useful to allow questions to be closed as duplicates of examples from Documentation. Or at least as something you can link to from an answer with confidence that the link won't go dead as long as SO itself is still there. So you don't have to duplicate the explanation of a side topic in an answer, and can summarize only enough that people who already understand that part won't have to click the link. Dec 21 '16 at 8:38
  • 20
    Did someone really vote to close as "unclear what they are asking"? Newsflash they are not asking anything it's an update from the documentation team, that is all.
    – user692942
    Dec 21 '16 at 10:20
  • 43
    @Lankymart: One might almost imagine that Q&A isn't the best format for announcements. Dec 21 '16 at 15:35
  • 11
    3 close votes as "Unclear what you are asking" on an official featured post? o.O
    – NSNoob
    Dec 22 '16 at 6:25
  • 7
    I disagree 100% @Lightness. The blog does not encourage this depth of feedback.
    – Travis J
    Dec 22 '16 at 18:31
  • 6
    @JonEricson: "My plan is to look through what people have already tried in terms of organization rather than dictate how people should organize." So to avoid dictating to us, you'll look at what other people have done... and then dictate that to us? It should also be noted that organization, for this kind of "documentation", does not really exist, because this kind of "documentation" has never been tried before. Example-first "documentation" has only existed in cookbooks before now; this is new territory, so there are no existing solutions to look at. Dec 23 '16 at 4:09
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    @JonEricson: "Or at least it's not how we do it here at Stack Overflow." But... that is how you do things on SO. In general, if the community is not positively mutinous about a subject, their input is noted and logged, but rarely acted upon. The same with Docs.SO. You've dictated everything about it: example-first style, flat organization hierarchy of tag/topic/example, examples as parts of topics rather than separate entities, and so on. Users asked for changes to some of these elements. But what was changed? Rep gain. Because that was the one people were absolutely livid over. Dec 23 '16 at 5:33
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    I completely lost all incentive to use documentation when it was clear the mission statement (not replicating existing good documentation) was completely ignored and continues to be. I tend to see it as second rate to other documentation that has a stricter style guide and is more consistently written which is unfortunate. My gut reaction when opening it is always "but I could point you to a great write up on that on another site" - latest example being Gang of Four design patterns
    – Ian
    Jan 2 '17 at 11:26

13 Answers 13

340

One of two things happen next: either the community slows to a virtual halt, or a handful of dedicated users get down to the real work of building a community.

I fail to see a path forward that can reasonably be expected to accomplish this. Why?

A place for discussion is a necessary element for this. But it is not sufficient. You need to get a handful of users who are both knowledgable and motivated to build documentation and a community.

And I don't see that happening. Not with Docs.SO as it currently stands or is likely to stand in the immediate future. I can only speak for myself, but I imagine that others will agree with me on these statements:

I do not believe in Docs.SO.

I do not believe that Tag/Topic/Example is a sufficient categorization mechanism, even for example-focused documentation. I do not understand what "Topic" means or how much stuff should be in one. I do not believe that examples ought to be arbitrarily connected to each other, such that editing supposedly distinct examples should be considered a single edit.

Indeed, even if its current implementation were good, that wouldn't be enough. Because I do not believe in the very foundational idea of Docs.SO: that example-focused documentation can be used to create good, useful, and comprehensive documentation for a system of significant complexity.

I believe in neither the idea behind Docs.SO as a means for creating effective documentation, nor the current implementation of that idea. Docs.SO to me seems firmly aimed in the wrong direction, both in implementation and in concept.

I cannot say how many people agree with me on these statements. However, the fact that most experts appear to have deserted Docs.SO within weeks of its deployment suggest that I am probably not alone in these criticisms. Statements from others also suggest that I'm probably not alone.

So what exactly is the benefit for experts to contribute to Docs.SO? They have to deal with a sub-standard mechanism for creating information (seriously, MediaWiki is better). They have to force their information into a design and organization scheme that you have arbitrarily imposed on them, instead of creating one that best fits the content being documented. And thanks to reputation, there is more of an incentive to post bad or plagiarized stuff than there is to focus on quality documentation.

What exactly are the advantages for using Docs.SO as a platform for creating documentation? What is the motivation for putting this stuff here, instead of literally anywhere else?

The "software skeleton" is precisely what is responsible for making Docs.SO unattractive to expert users. That it is "nearing completion" merely suggests that these flaws will never be fixed, that they're not considered "bugs" but "features".

So I cannot see how it is reasonable to expect experts to appear who are willing to "get down to the real work of building a community", given that the tools they have are so poor.

No matter how much it gets ignored, the fact remains that the Emperor is still naked.

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    Maybe SO Docs is just built for a different audience. I'm not sure what that audience is, but that's the only reason i could see SO to still be pushing it.
    – Kevin B
    Dec 20 '16 at 21:47
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    Obviously, I respectfully disagree. I think the point we depart ways is in our disagreement over whether a community will form around it as a community formed around Q&A. As I explain in the opening paragraph, I don't think we can know for sure what direction the community is going to take from observing the reaction to launch. People will give up on even successful communities during the early days. Unfortunately, if you don't believe in example-first documentation, there's really nothing I can do to change your mind. We'll just have to see what happens next. Dec 20 '16 at 22:25
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    @JonEricson: "As I explain in the opening paragraph, I don't think we can know for sure what direction the community is going to take from observing the reaction to launch." You may not be able to say for certain which way things will go. But do you have a basis for saying that things are moving in a positive direction? Because I don't see any evidence that people are out there salivating at the thought of contributing to Docs.SO if it only had a discussion system. Dec 20 '16 at 23:05
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    I still think rep should be removed ive been against it for quite some time.
    – JonH
    Dec 20 '16 at 23:27
  • 69
    @JonEricson Re: drawing comparisons between Q&A and Docs. When Stack Overflow Q&A became a thing, people wanted programming Q&A. It was something that was seriously lacking from the internet. A hole worth filling, if you will. No one is going around saying "We need a place for examples first user contributed documentation!" It is not a hole that is in desperate need of filling.
    – user4639281
    Dec 20 '16 at 23:44
  • 68
    @JonEricson for the people who know those technologies to decide - if Docs was a free-format wiki, I'd agree with your laissez-faire approach. But you built a system that (to me) strongly embodies cookbooks, with the focus on small code snippets, the lack of high-level organization, and sorting by voting rather than by logical order. Telling us to build whatever we want within Docs feels like saying we can have any color we like, so long as it's black. Dec 20 '16 at 23:48
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    That last comment is key, @Jon - with the caveat that this could still fail of course. Thus far we've been aiming at a somewhat under-served niche in terms of functionality, but whether that's under-served because folks have overlooked it or under-served because it's simply far less important than other features remains to be seen; this is yet another attempt at adding structure to a wiki, something folks have been stabbing at from various angles for 20 years (including 8 years of Stack Overflow); a few have succeeded, a lot have not.
    – Shog9
    Dec 21 '16 at 0:11
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    @JonEricson: "So I hope you understand why I'm not terribly worried about the apparent disinterest." Your experience with SO and mine are quite different. Yes, I joined up some time past beta, but my experience with forums and other things were very much not "good to me". And my preference for SO was not due to its content, but due to its structure, the way it focused interaction in a productive way. The way it actively fought against discussion and dithering. It was attractive by design, not because of what people did with it. Docs.SO is not that. Dec 21 '16 at 0:43
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    @JonEricson - The introduction of Docs doesn't ease "the difficulty people have transitioning from consumer to producer" any more than you turn a moviegoer into a filmmaker by putting an NLE app on their smartphone, or turn a homeowner into an architect by throwing a pencil at them, or turn a murderer into a judge by hauling them into a courtroom. Producing good documentation requires actual skills in language, writing, organization, and more, not to mention experience, proper tools, and so on, none of which Docs provides. Dec 21 '16 at 3:23
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    @TigerhawkT3: Personally, I think the difference between what SO faced then and what Docs.SO faces now is really simple: nobody believes in Docs.SO. You see very few posts that are wholly in support of the current direction of Docs.SO. By contrast, while SO had its critics in the beginning, it also had evangelists. People who weren't Joel&Jeff, but ordinary users who still believed in its mission of using Q&A to build a knowledgebase. Where are the true believers in Docs.SO? If Docs.SO is such a good idea, why is nobody defending it who isn't on the staff? Dec 21 '16 at 3:38
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    I'm willing to give example-based documentation a chance, but for as long as it's still called Documentation, people are going to continue treating it like they're writing their own manuals, not contributing to a repository of self-contained examples. And this is a separate issue from experts not wanting to deal with terrible contributions from people who have no idea what they're talking about - we already have enough of a problem with people spreading misinformation in Q&A.
    – BoltClock
    Dec 21 '16 at 4:25
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    @BoltClock: "but for as long as it's still called Documentation, ... not contributing to a repository of self-contained examples" The fact that the examples are considered sub-sections of the topic as a whole doesn't help promote the idea that the examples are "self-contained". Nor does the fact that we order examples based on voting patterns. Dec 21 '16 at 4:50
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    @Nicol Bolas: Indeed. Even if I get behind it as a concept, it's still poorly implemented.
    – BoltClock
    Dec 21 '16 at 5:11
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    I was going to post something but this covers most of why I gave up on Documentation - particularly the huge amount of plagiarization that just ate up most of my time editing/deleting and the fact that I disagree with the "cookbook" format. Examples is not needed and covered by Q&A anyway (which lends itself to examples well anyway IMHO).
    – LinkBerest
    Dec 22 '16 at 0:07
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    @Trilarion: "Actually we could start pointing out all the flaws in Q&A..." The difference is that people actually believe in Q&A as a concept, even if some elements of its implementation are imperfect or leave something to be desired. By contrast, has anyone actually defended the idea of example-first as being an effective means of creating "documentation"? As being a means to create a nice cookbook, maybe. As a means to create something that most people would recognize as "documentation"? No. Dec 23 '16 at 0:49
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The single biggest challenge that Docs still faces is not discussion of what's in there, it's policing what's been done. In fact, that's the crux of all of the gripes with Docs. Reading the myriad rants on it, it's the recurring theme.

  • Random new guy LOVES a tutorial and he wants to share it with everyone, so he rolls up a new Topic/Example and recreates it within Docs, not realizing he's promulgating bad coding practices because the tutorial he found is 6 years old. Slips through the cracks and hangs out for months or years, merrily allowing bad coding practices to propagate
  • A veteran user writes a long and detailed Example for a Topic. One day, he looks to link to it and, after some 30 minutes of looking around (there's no notices when this happens and it falls out of all your Docs lists), realizes that 4 users with a combined reputation of less than 1000 have deleted the entire Topic
  • Another random new guy with a pocketful of rep decides a well written article needs to include this one edge case. While he's in there, he makes several other confusing edits. It's approved by 3 people who don't even have a score in that tag.

This brings up my second point. All of the above are infuriating to people who care about coding and it highlights a philosophy conflict between Q&A and Docs: ownership. If I post a Q or A, I own it. If someone edits it, I get a notice. Deletion is hard and rare. Docs is fast and loose. You don't get notified of ANYTHING except rep gain. Deletion is far easier and much more common. You don't own it and that's not a bug, that's a feature.

It's no secret we've been looking to Wikipedia for inspiration.

You might not know this, but in academic circles they actually tell you to not cite Wikipedia (emphasis mine)

There's nothing more convenient than Wikipedia if you're looking for some quick information, and when the stakes are low (you need a piece of information to settle a bet with your roommate, or you want to get a basic sense of what something means before starting more in-depth research), you may get what you need from Wikipedia. In fact, some instructors may advise their students to read entries for scientific concepts on Wikipedia as a way to begin understanding those concepts.

Nevertheless, when you're doing academic research, you should be extremely cautious about using Wikipedia. As its own disclaimer states, information on Wikipedia is contributed by anyone who wants to post material, and the expertise of the posters is not taken into consideration. Users may be reading information that is outdated or that has been posted by someone who is not an expert in the field or by someone who wishes to provide misinformation. (Case in point: Four years ago, an Expos student who was writing a paper about the limitations of Wikipedia posted a fictional entry for himself, stating that he was the mayor of a small town in China. Four years later, if you type in his name, or if you do a subject search on Wikipedia for mayors of towns in China, you will still find this fictional entry.) Some information on Wikipedia may well be accurate, but because experts do not review the site's entries, there is a considerable risk in relying on this source for your essays.

So, in this sense, SO has successfully created its own Wikipedia for software documentation. That success also contains all of the flaws as well. Worse, people are using it to write real software, not academic papers. Then they come back to Q&A with these bad practices, where they, in some cases, get smacked down hard for bad things they learned in Docs.

This all having been said, I see the point of Docs. I see where it can be something that is an asset. But the process here has soured a lot of people who thought so too at one point and the process has taught them differently. I'm glad a CM posted this because this is where Docs needs a lot of work. Docs needs to be tightened up some and then you're going to have to re-sell this to the people who walked away.

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    To be fair, this problem also somewhat exists in Q&A with highly upvoted factually incorrect answers, and it's impossible to get them deleted without the owner being involved.
    – user247702
    Dec 21 '16 at 14:27
  • I feel you phrased my point in a better way, but I am 100% with you on retaining ownership (and deciding when to share it, as I posted on my answer).
    – Oleg
    Dec 21 '16 at 14:31
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    @Stijn You can delete things in Q&A with community involvement. SOCVR is an example of a place that can get that kind of thing done with enough agreement.
    – Machavity Mod
    Dec 21 '16 at 14:40
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    @Machavity You cannot vote to delete a positively scored answer as a regular member. And you can't downvote with a bunch of people to make it eligible for deletion when it has 100+ score.
    – user247702
    Dec 21 '16 at 14:43
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    @Stijn You are probably talking about exceptions not the norm. There is no such a thing as a perfect system, but a system that minimizes false positives. You can't pivot your decisions around edge cases.
    – Oleg
    Dec 21 '16 at 14:59
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    "Deletion is far easier and much more common." I'm sure that this has to be done to revert the swats of "Random new guy LOVES a tutorial and he wants to share it with everyone" cases. I've rarely (aka never have) seen a good example getting deleted.
    – Braiam
    Dec 21 '16 at 15:09
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    Yes to all of this. This is exactly why, after a few concerted efforts to contribute meaningfully to Documentation, I gave up. I only have so much time, and I don’t want to spend all of it correcting what Mike C so aptly called a “sea of inaccuracy.” There just aren’t enough experts to keep things clean. Ownership is of mild importance to me compared to knowing I’ve contributed to a good work that continues to be good.
    – VGR
    Dec 21 '16 at 15:22
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    The examples might not be the best, but this post describes factors that will discourage experts from contributing to SO documentation. Most fields have a slew of texts or documentation written "for beginners and non-experts" that teaches bad technique or practice. Experts in most fields, however, are a minority and people who have only learned bad technique are a majority, so "community based" voting will inherently allow poor quality material to dominate.This is why professional development of documentation involves review and consensus by qualified experts, not the population at large.
    – Peter
    Dec 24 '16 at 23:19
65

I've said a couple times that the Docs format doesn't grab me personally.

It would be nice to see it succeed, though, with high quality correct examples and useful summaries of things. Especially if we can make use of the fact that it's part of SO itself, so use Docs links in answers without as much extraction of text from the link (because link-rot won't happen).

Maybe also closing questions as duplicates of something answered by a doc, for cases where a doc is a better fit than a canonical Q&A.


I don't get excited about overwhelming tasks, so I don't think I'll be one of those pioneers, though.

Hopefully that's just me and other people aren't so put off by a gigantic task like documenting [x86] in general, with no specific question. To me, it just feels like un-fun work compared to writing answers.


I did write one solid example for docs (as well as minor changes to some others). I approved the initial version posted by a new user since it looked ok, but then ended up rewriting nearly every paragraph with better / different explanations and more detail, and every line of code with more / different comments. It was kind of frustrating the whole time because the more I did, the more I felt like I shouldn't have approved the original in the first place.

And the whole time I had no idea of the background of the reader. i.e. will they know C while learning asm? Will they know about POSIX system calls? I'm sure this has been discussed before, but for me the lack of a question as context leaves so many things open-ended that it's impossible to keep anything short when writing docs, so it's a difficult struggle between explaining everything vs. keeping it short enough to be useful.


I might well find myself interested in doing something if the overall quality wasn't so low. Right now I feel like one high-quality example would just be a drop in the bucket, and not be sufficient. Also, if the rest of docs doesn't explain other topics well, then I have nothing to build on, and have to explain every concept I mention.

All of these things make the thought of writing more docs feel like a daunting task that I don't want to take on. That's how I personally feel when I've tried to motivate myself to go have a look at docs. Rational arguments don't seem to work very well in convincing my (literally) ADHD brain that I should just get something done even if I can't finish in one sitting.

What really matters to me is that I enjoy the time I spend on it, and that hasn't been the case for much of the short time I've spent on Docs. It's been more like "there's so much bad stuff here that needs fixing" all the time.


This shouldn't stop other people from enjoying the time they spend on docs. Almost everything I've said is more about what makes me tick and what my personal experience has been. Hopefully that helps explain part of how I wandered off in step 2.

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    "To me, it just feels like un-fun work" - That's because it is work. Dec 21 '16 at 10:46
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    For me, a related concern is that if I did take the time to contribute high-quality content to Docs, I'd want to take advantage of that and link to it. But at its current state, I wouldn't want to point anyone there because most of what they'll find there is of exceptionally low quality, if not outright wrong. Sending them there would be a net disservice because once they navigated beyond my single hand-picked example, they'd be getting bad information. I don't want to be responsible for that, I don't want to have my name associated with that, and I don't think that is helpful.
    – Cody Gray Mod
    Dec 21 '16 at 13:01
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    @CodyGray perhaps even more importantly, since there's no ownership and no editorial control, your example could be deleted or (worse) edited into garbage at any moment, making your links to it even more harmful and pointless.
    – Mark Amery
    Dec 21 '16 at 16:05
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    I think you hit upon the critical problem: when writing an answer, you have a particular audience in mind. That is to say, the asker is a representative of some larger group of people with similar experience. But when there's no question, who are you writing for. (By the way, this is really the reason we close questions as "too broad".) My guess is that the answer will be different for every tag and perhaps even every topic. This is why I believe the discussion mechanism is so critical. Lot's of stuff to chew on in this answer. Thank you. Dec 21 '16 at 16:09
  • "It's been more like "there's so much bad stuff here that needs fixing" all the time." Well, this probably means people should go on a deleting bad examples spree in order to rescue Docs. "And the whole time I had no idea of the background of the reader. i.e. will they know C while learning asm? Will they know about POSIX system calls?" You could mention requirements (and potentially link to resources) necessary for understanding the topic/example. Btw. I'm not too convinced by the example centric approach either - it's too close to "give me the codez". I would have liked concepts centric.
    – Trilarion
    Dec 22 '16 at 22:28
  • 1
    @Trilarion: I think it's easy to forget how useful examples are for beginners with a clue. When I'm trying to learn something new, it's often really helpful to see an actual example of the syntax of a command, statement, or whatever. That helps a lot in interpreting the explanation / docs. Also, you can put up whatever content, even if it doesn't actually have examples. e.g. Some of the stuff in the x86 section on SO docs (like the calling convention stuff) is not actually examples. (It's just incomplete summaries of what goes where, and only works for integer args...) Dec 23 '16 at 1:42
  • @TigerhawkT3 Agree. There's the service of providing a clearinghouse for goodwill-based Q&A fora, and then there's an outright attempt to centralize (i.e., corner the market for) technical documentation within your own servers. The "Stack Overflow in person" event idea was more ingenuous, because it could have led to, say, people teaching each other directly (still an underpaid activity!) instead of doing expert data entry into a monster DB. Dec 25 '16 at 6:22
33

I kind of feel like the primary problems with SO Documentation are:

  1. Search. You often can't find what you are looking for other than by going to the topic it is in and scrolling. We need to be able to find examples very quickly, which has a lot to do with how examples are formulated/named, but we also need to somehow be able to structure them in such a way that helps with the searching. For example, If searching for a JavaScript example related to arrays, you should be able to find it by searching , , and then the method name. Currently, if you search sodocs with sitesearch in Google, that only takes you to the topic in most cases that I've tested.

  2. Unclear Intent. When you look at various documentation topics, it is unclear what documentation is actually supposed to look like on Stack Overflow. Kevin and Jon keep saying that this is on purpose and that each tag should instead focus on what each tag needs. This is very unclear and isn't being followed in my opinion because the JavaScript tag (and many of the other popular ones) do not need methods to be documented the way they currently are, the official documentation already cover that quite well. The Stack Overflow Docs team keeps saying it should be X, but we keep getting Y and no one is moving to fix it. The discussion feature is supposedly going to fix this, but... I don't see how that could possibly fix it. We're just going to argue over what the Stack Overflow Docs team intended Stack Overflow Documentation to look like. Maybe I'll be proven wrong.

  3. Not well integrated with Q/A yet. If there was one single thing that would change my view on Stack Overflow Documentation, it would be being able to use it to close these often-asked, but never dupe-closed questions. If this was allowed, #2's problem above would make more sense, and we'd simply document everything, regardless of whether the official documentation cover it, because it would allow us to close more questions (assuming we were actually able to find the examples... see #1.)

The Discussion feature is certainly a step in the right direction; I just don't think we have been given enough direction on what Stack Overflow Documentation is actually meant to be.

3
  • 5
    I agree with all three points. #2 is my responsibility, but I can't do it alone. I certainly don't have the first idea of what is lacking in existing JavaScript documentation. It's also impossible to have an effective discussion here on meta when all the work being done on the content is somewhere else. The discussion tab is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of success. Dec 21 '16 at 18:07
  • I do not think question should be closed , This site is all about getting answers , not categorizing the information.
    – Suraj Jain
    Dec 27 '16 at 14:26
  • 2
    @SurajJain "This site is all about getting answers" Yes, and when the answer already exists here, we need to be able to easily find/present it instead of endlessly repeating/recreating it.
    – Kevin B
    Jan 3 '17 at 19:10
22

"Too many cooks spoil the broth" - the famous saying.

The main difference between Documentation and Wikipedia is that the latter has the established authority system. It is overly-bureaucratized, but it works. And so you mostly can trust the information from Wikipedia - the controversial cases gets judged and fixed.

Unlike that, Documentation is ruled by the same mob as the mother site. It means no one can guarantee that some day the information won't be spoiled, deliberately or accidentally, and left unnoticed. All the proposals to get the knowledgeable members more authority are steadily torpedoed on Meta. So, this is the policy and won't be changed.

Personally, I went to despair after a few cases that told me that Stack Overflow is not suitable for sharing knowledge.

  • The first one was my own question that was spoiled by the ignorant user - so I cannot link to this post any more. Your community scolded me when I tried to get rid of the nuisance. OK, I can write another post and use this one (until someone will spoil it in turn). But yet the old one remains in place, spreading misknowledge.
  • The second one was the most upvoted answer for the most upvoted question in the tag, that was spoiled by some enthusiast. It went unnoticed for half a year, because, you know, nobody cares. And the only person who would keep a constant eye on this post, was banned.

So I think that although Stack Overflow will remain de facto a forum for quick and dirty answers to "fix my code for me" questions, thanks to the gamification system, the attempt to fix the initial design flaw by introducing Documentation will fail too. One professional cannot stand against a dozen enthusiasts smelling gamification points.

No doubts that a large community will be developed - people are always weak for the virtual stuff like points, badges and hats. But the main site didn't teach you the lesson that quantity doesn't mean quality.

3
  • 4
    I more or less agree with this assessment. (Though I will say your two cases seem, um, inconsequential? Surely there are better examples out there.) We considered some sort of longform, single author, no-editing-without-explicit-permission content type and decided we didn't really have anything to add in that space. Instead, we are taking a risk and doubling down on trusting programmers to spread correct information. Or maybe it's better to say useful information. Even bad advice can be useful if someone is willing to politely explain why it's bad. Dec 22 '16 at 17:03
  • 2
    Ideally we would have a system where we could elevate certain posts to canonical status, so that only trusted users can edit them. The problem is how to determine which users that are "trusted". Rep and badges have proven to be rather poor indicators of a person's actual technical knowledge in a given area. Maybe something like user-elected topic moderators would work? Where badge holders get to vote on who's to be trusted to change canonical posts. Or alternatively all edits must pass review and these "topic moderators" would be the only ones allowed to review of changes to canonical posts.
    – Lundin
    Dec 23 '16 at 10:08
  • Re. "the first one" link, all I see is you repeatedly vandalizing someone's answer, and correctly being rolled back. The system is good for sharing knowledge - but you do it by writing your own answer, not by substantially modifying someone else's. The users then vote on the answers posted. It's not up to one person to unilaterally decide you are right and someone else is wrong -- almost every user-based "moderation" decision on SO requires multiple voters.
    – M.M
    Apr 18 '17 at 0:45
20

There seems (to me) to be a couple strong contradictions between what is quoted as the key to making docs work and the intentions displayed. Maybe these examples should be followed? Or, if the community feels this is the right direction, other manifestos should be quoted.

A) First, the statement that "the philosophy of rewarding work on Documentation [...] as Q&A will remain."

Rewarding means ownership of content, especially in the way it is functioning right now. All we've been doing is determining how much of a documentation entry "belongs" to each of its authors.

Sure, the goal of this is gamification, i.e. encouraging participation with reputation. However, do collaborative efforts work with the same stimuli than competing answers? The quote you use yourself says quite the opposite:

Wikipedia [...] de-emphasized the social ownership of content. [...] The fact that it’s difficult to tell who wrote an article, or who edited it — rather than discouraging contribution, as you might assume — actually encouraged contributions, Hill found. “Low textual ownership resulted in more collaboration,” he put it.

So I would postulate another way of rewarding participation in docs should be studied. Or none at all?

B) Then, sticking to “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” would mean making docs as accessible as possible to users.

I see search engines may (now?) index docs, however the search functionality is still pretty poor. And since docs pages don't score so high on Google (yet?), that means few eyeballs, thus few real "drive-bys".

The tendency to encourage high-rep users disproportionately and keeping the "beta" sticker on the docs link are so many signs that you're doing "cathedral building", as is theorized by Eric Raymond in the very page you link.

I feel that as long as we don't really have a crowd of end-users on docs (that is, people who come to get information, not reputation) we won't get out of this limbo.

2
  • 5
    My position on reputation is somewhat complex. I think it works best when it augments intrinsic motivation and simply doesn't work longterm as the sole motivation. One of the problems on Wikipedia right now is that there are fewer and fewer active editors. We think a reputation system helps some people stick with SO and is one of the reasons we still see growth in active users. You make an astute point about end-users. I think Docs is less fun (even not fun) because it's hard to see how it helps people right now. Dec 21 '16 at 17:28
  • 9
    Interesting read on in-/ex-trinsic motivation @JonEricson. But my point stands: if the key takeaway from Wikipedia is that less authorship brings more collaborators, then we need to find a a reward system that doesn't rely on authorship (e.g. fixed rewards, like the edits now for <2K on Q&A, I'm sure we can be creative and gamify this in plenty different ways). Or alternately, drop the collaborative part, and revert to competing examples with unique authorship. That is, the answers of the Q&A model. But this in-between isn't working out.
    – Cimbali
    Dec 21 '16 at 20:01
16

I do like that the Stack Overflow team is very open to our feedback, and that's why I am going to post my two cents. It's my personal view and in no way tries to be representative of the whole community.

  • I like the idea of Docs as examples first, but as of now it is not clear if that is the official direction. Many posts become endless tutorials, often of very low quality and full of duplication.

  • By suggesting that

    As Eric Raymond notes, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

    and this will gradually improve the quality akin to the Wikipedia model is wrong. If there is no unified direction, people will just keep adding rather than improving.

  • With the discussion feature, things might get better, yet you will need someone that has time and interest in discussing before actually creating!

  • This model unsustainable. Its implementation puts it in competition with official documentations, yet the Stack Overflow team tries to keep alive the idea of examples.

  • A community-based knowledge hub can thrive if there is a missing gap, and that was the case of Wikipedia. With official documentation, paid for, scrutinized by experts, uniformly written, there is no space for community-based documentation.

My strong view

My view embeds the points above.

I want to write concise, clear and specialized examples that are not covered by official documentation. I do not want my example to be f***d with overnight, and I do not want to discuss about it before I do it. If you like my example, you will upvote it. If not, nobody will ever see it again. You can comment on it, and I might decide to amend it, but I want full authorship of my examples.

This is why, I will probably stick with Q&A, because I mostly retain the authorship of my answers although I do not decide the topic.

From a Wikipedia point-of-view, if the author is the only one retaining the ownership, how can things improve? Well, by the arguments of large numbers, you will find an author that wanted to contribute with the same example and he might decide to comment on the existing example. The original author might then like the comment and share ownership over the example to allow edits.

People will start having that feel of pride in their contribution, and not the current, "oh geez, why!? it was good yesterday...".

Duplication can be dealt with voted deletions or suggested merges by recognized authors.

12
  • 1
    Unless I misunderstood the purpose of Documentation, the goal is to encourage collaboration. Programmers try to avoid reinventing the wheel. Documentation is more of a moving target than Q&A questions, and it's hard to know everything about a topic. If we can't collaborate if you make a single mistake, then we have to recreate your example. You as an individual might respond to comments, but many people wont and it would slow things down to require so much moderator intervention.
    – DonyorM
    Dec 21 '16 at 12:43
  • 11
    I've seen this quote thrown around a couple of times, but no one has yet mentioned that it's been repeatedly disproven. Heartbleed was the most recent example. There was a massive security bug in OpenSSL's cryptography library that, although it must have been seen thousands of times by otherwise competent programmers, given the popularity of this library, nobody caught the bug. I don't know, maybe ESR would say this isn't "enough", but if the required number of eyeballs is too large, it makes the principle meaningless.
    – Cody Gray Mod
    Dec 21 '16 at 13:04
  • 2
    @DonyorM By your own argument " Programmers try to avoid reinventing the wheel", Docs should not exist then. My point is that, is it worth throwing 100 edits at bad content or a couple on good one? With my model, the bad content will just not get upvoted, and yes, people will create a better example. There is no need for moderators to polish bad examples, those will eventually get deled or forgotten forever.
    – Oleg
    Dec 21 '16 at 14:27
  • 2
    @Oleg: "There is no need for moderators to polish bad examples, those will eventually get deled or forgotten forever." This assumes that 1) Topics can have an infinite number of examples. They cannot do so currently. 2) Examples were wholly distinct from other examples on the same topic. They currently are not. 3) Examples on the same topic meaningfully compete with each other, such that one example could reasonably be considered "better" than another. Since "topic" has no definition that would create such meaningful competition, that is currently not the case. Dec 21 '16 at 14:39
  • 1
    @Oleg: "My point is that, is it worth throwing 100 edits at bad content or a couple on good one?" If it weren't, why do we allow it to happen in Q&A? We give experienced users unrestricted editing rights to questions and answers for precisely this reason: so that errors can be corrected and content improved. Dec 21 '16 at 14:41
  • @NicolBolas I dislike the topic organization and do not think it makes it easier to search stuff. You should read my view as abstracted from the current Docs structure. Your second point can be addressed with the recognized authors that I suggest. How you define this category is a matter of fine tuning. What I want to avoid, is to see my contribution being worsened by the 100 edits, which is something that has happened and led me to abandon Docs.
    – Oleg
    Dec 21 '16 at 14:57
  • @Oleg: "What I want to avoid, is to see my contribution being worsened by the 100 edits" That's the nature of any collaboratively edited platform: someone can come along and make a change that you consider to be worse. Your post is basically saying that collaborative editing is the great flaw of Docs.SO; I can't really agree. Collaborative editing may not be your thing, but I contest the idea that experts in general are warded off by the very idea. There are plenty of collaboratively edited bags of info things out there which experts contribute to. Dec 21 '16 at 15:05
  • @NicolBolas Second line of my post: "It's my personal view and in no way tries to be representative of the whole community.". I think collaborative docs has no place because official docs have stronger incentives, and they are already there. Also, I am happy if experts contribute. As of now, there is no way to identify experts reliably.
    – Oleg
    Dec 21 '16 at 15:11
  • 2
    It sounds like you are happy enough to continue answering questions which is perfectly fine. It's our job to build the product to attract contributors. (And to be clear, we don't expect all of our contributors on Docs will want to answer questions.) If we fail, it will be pretty clear in 2017. By all means, don't do something you don't enjoy. Especially don't give up doing something you do enjoy. Dec 21 '16 at 17:20
  • @JonEricson Thanks, and by no means I wish docs to fail. On the contrary, I had high expectations, especially the example based approach sounded very good. Also, the potential to present a single interface across different languages is also very appealing (It took me time to understand the standard in man pages...). I also wanted to have the luxury to decide the topic of my answer, but was not ready to endure the frustration from low quality edits to my own creations.
    – Oleg
    Dec 21 '16 at 17:44
  • 3
    Oleg's point about ownership is a good one. If you have a minor change (i.e. typo, formatting convention, etc.), then you can propose the edit to the original content (a la Q&A edits), otherwise write a new example and let the community identify the most correct/helpful content. Dec 21 '16 at 21:10
  • 6
    "This is why, I will probably stick with Q&A, because I mostly retain the authorship of my answers although I do not decide the topic." - But even with Q&A, you can choose the topic - ask a question and self-answer it. That's been explicitly encouraged for ages. (This, by the way, is one of the many reasons I've simply never been interested in docs; the only use case that it's meant to work for is examples of how to perform specific tasks, and even that can be done better via Q&A.)
    – Mark Amery
    Dec 23 '16 at 17:59
13

One of the big problems seems to be that anybody and everybody can create, edit, and delete information, with no regard for their level of expertise.

If you look at other industries like book publishing, or websites like PluralSight, the authors of those books and courses have been vetted in some way to ensure they both know their material, and can teach it.

Putting in a vetting process would significantly limit the number of people able to contribute, but would increase the quality, assuming you could get those people interested in contributing.

Another benefit of that would be that users writing documentation know their hard work is not going to be undone by someone less qualified. Others could link to those documents with confidence.

At the very least, maybe have a document status that shows it was written by an expert. The average user can work on other documents, but not those ones. One group of documents are expert-level, and the other group is community-level. Rely on community-level documents at your own risk.

2
  • 2
    Wikipedia has a system of protecting pages. In addition to that, we have a historical lock that shuts down a page from getting further edits. While those aren't in place just yet for Documentation, they seem reasonable additions. Vetting contributors isn't, however: "This is the scary part, the great leap of faith that Stack Overflow is predicated on: trusting your fellow programmers." Dec 23 '16 at 19:44
  • 4
    @JonEricson That's another unrelated problem: over the years, SO has gone from being a site for professional- and enthusiast programmers to become an interactive beginner tutorial. We used to close questions where the OP themselves didn't even know anything about the topic they were asking about, but now such questions are considered on-topic. The programming experts are leaving and the non-programmers are moving in. So it is rather about trusting your fellow non-programmer: the tutorial-beggar examples-junkie. Who is, as it turns out, the most likely user of example-oriented documentation.
    – Lundin
    Jan 2 '17 at 15:41
12

Also I never found the Docs.SO idea appealing. While it would be great to have good documentation for everything it's not why people come to SO. Here are my thoughts:

  1. When you end up here from a search engine you just want a quick solution that works and don't want to read paragraphs and paragraphs of examples. Many of the articles are just overwhelming and, as weird as it might sound, too much choice is often just confusing.

  2. Developers don't like to write documentation - "everybody" knows that. Most of us have day time jobs, we cannot afford spending hours and hours on SO, just to write a full article about a specific problem. As it has been said already: it's a lot of work to write good documentation. A quick answer to a specific question is much simpler to write.

  3. The real problem IMO is SO's search. If people would intelligently be lead to the right answer, they wouldn't ask the same questions again and again. I constantly get totally unrelated suggestions when I search or write a new question. Maybe a wizard like style would help to narrow down the area to search through. Often people don't really know how to formulate their question. This is where SO should improve and can shine.

2
  • 2
    Yeah. There's a tension between people who want to cram every last detail of how a function works and people who just want to remember the common use case. Huge examples (or topics with many of them) aren't so helpful in isolation. One of the ideas of Docs was (and might yet be) to gather answers to "too broad" questions in a canonical place. That way, people could answer them quickly and not worry about leaving out important caveats and pitfalls. Instead, write a short answer and link to the relevant topic. Figuring out how to make that vision a reality is certainly one of our goals for 2017. Dec 26 '16 at 23:41
  • 8
    "...people who want to cram every last detail of how a function works..." Well, yeah, because that's what the word "Documentation" connotes. A collection of single-purpose demonstrations is usually called something else.
    – jscs
    Dec 31 '16 at 17:40
10

I just wanted to share how I envision Stack Overflow documentation.

How to contribute to a documentation topic?

Everything about Stack Overflow is questions / answers, and it's great. Why not use the same thing for documentation?

The community answer nearly got it right, except for the fact that it suppressed all the reputation... With a little tweak it could be great. For example, let's say that you have a topic that you want documentation on, you would do:

  1. Create a documentation topic: Like a normal question except that the documentation result will be put in the question body
  2. Let people answer this question like they would do normally and earn reputation for their answer.
  3. Then take all the good part in the answers provided and build the documentation answer (directly in the question body)

Just take a moment to consider how hard it is to contribute to an unknown tag with the current documentation system compare to this one above. You could now start a topic about anything, a good topic would receive points and a bad topic would fall into oblivion, exactly like Q&A.

Next you need organization

Being able to start a documentation topic about anything is a great start, but to get something useful you need to be able to organize them. Whether I want to build a quick tutorial or a reference manual, I will need a way to organize the topics in a logical order.

The current system is very lacking on that front. We need to be able to organize the topics how we want. It could be as simple as a side menu for all the topics that are linked together.

So, "documentation" would just be a group of ordered documentation topics, and you could create many "documentations" to address many different needs.

1
  • 7
    So at first I thought the 'Q&A first, then to Docs' model would do a better job of generating documentation that someone actually needs because it's tied to an actual question. But then I realized, once you get a good canonical Q&A, you're already done; moving it to Docs is just extra work. Dec 22 '16 at 1:19
6

I think documentation so far failed on two fronts:

  1. It was supposed to be example centric, but it is rather a topic list way beyond example and illustration of individual functions / concepts. I think the main reason for this is that in contrast to the generated API documentation (Doxygen, JavaDoc...) SO documentation lacks an externally given structure. I think SO documentation could work if its scope was limited to individual functions/methods and examples of how to call them. Much like RubyDoc with its plenty of example below each method http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.4.0/Class.html

  2. SO documentation in my mind was an attempt to draw away some questions from SO Q&A in the direction of RTFM. If this is really the goal, then I am wondering why other means should not be considered first: Just a mode for homework alone would probably get rid of 30% of all questions. If done right it could be more fun to help newbies who are not yet at the stage to ask a real question that is of general interest.

-5

Well, docs.SO is nearly ready. :-)

I actually don't use it, because I get mostly better hits by google. If I have a question, I simply ask google, it directs me either to the SE (in around a half of the cases) or to same non-SE site. It never directs me to the docs SE.

The few docs I've checked there were mainly from the docs review queue, and honestly... they are far from an usable quality.

Actually I could help to improve them, but I already collected the rep I wanted to collect here, and now I use the system as it is intended.

And... honestly, but it could maybe ergonomically better developed. It is simply... non-intuitive, uneasy, at least compared to the Q&A.

What could a disadvantage: the Q&A can help to solve specific problems, an API reference can show the whole functionality of a technology. The docs.SE is somewhere between the two, and this is why it can't race with any of them.

2
  • 5
    It is "nearly ready" because most of the docs "are far from an usable quality", and because it is "non-intuitive [and] uneasy"? I don't know if the smiley face is supposed to imply irony, but this answer doesn't make a lot of sense.
    – Cody Gray Mod
    Dec 31 '16 at 8:01
  • Nearly ready from the view of the code. The content still requires some year of work, in my opinion. But the community will do that. It is not so bad - maybe it is too different. It should have been made more like the Q&A.
    – peterh
    Dec 31 '16 at 16:54
-10

For storing organized information about the universe (and that includes IT concerns) there is Wikipedia.

For helping people with specific programming-related questions, there is a stack-*.com site.

Try to not forget the roots and original motivation of this place.

13
  • ey downvoters, if you don't like what i say it doesn't means to donwvote... don't remain anonymous, argue with we.. perhaps you could enlighten me in a way i am not seeing. My point is very simple.. when i have specific programing/IT problems i come to stackoverflow (via google).. when i look for organized information in order to learn more about some "field of knowledge" I generally ends in wikipedia (via google again...)... be with me or not... is how i handle things...
    – Victor
    Dec 23 '16 at 14:00
  • 15
    "if you don't like what i say it doesn't means to donwvote" Yes, that's exactly what it means. This is how Meta works.
    – Cody Gray Mod
    Dec 23 '16 at 14:40
  • okey Cody, i would love to hear why you don't agree. This is what i'm asking... 'don't remain anonymous, argue with we.. perhaps you could enlighten me in a way i am not seeing.' My point is to give some feedback, don't be shy.
    – Victor
    Dec 23 '16 at 15:04
  • 4
    Actually, I do agree with you. In fact, I upvoted the answer. I was just correcting the incorrect statement in your comment. The other thing you need to realize is that not all of the arguments need to happen explicitly in comments. The disagreement is implicit by downvoting one answer and upvoting another (or contributing an answer of your own).
    – Cody Gray Mod
    Dec 23 '16 at 15:08
  • Sorry @CodyGray but i don't get... So.. you share my opinion? That's cool.. otherwise it would be good to hear why not. That's the only thing i am talking about. If you think that i have some grammatical errors please point them!
    – Victor
    Dec 23 '16 at 15:11
  • stack* is not about helping people. I don't care about people and their problems. But I love to find answers to my questions at SO. So we collect good questions and a couple of good answers to them.
    – usr1234567
    Dec 25 '16 at 21:42
  • 1
    all stackexchange sites have the goals of providing knowledge taking the form of question & answers. So it's the same as a Wikipedia, but instead of being based of words/names, it's based upon questions and answers. This is why questions that are too specific to be usefull to anyone except the OP are usually closed. To quote one of the founders terms : recude the ratio of usefull information/noise on internet
    – Walfrat
    Dec 26 '16 at 16:55
  • 1
    @usr1234567 so you are lurker that comes to stackoverflow only to gets others answers, in the process taking care of your problems and nothing more.. is okey, thanks for showing us how polite you are. Anyway.. call problems or not... stackoverflows helps ordinary people. Thanks Walfrat, your answer (far more polite) is quite the objetive of any wikipedia alike system.. to organize the acknowledge. "usefull information/noise" it will be always be relative to the seeker of information... to my humble opinion. There is right or wrong info, but useful it depends to who and his context.
    – Victor
    Dec 27 '16 at 15:41
  • why this post is blured?
    – Victor
    Dec 28 '16 at 18:59
  • 1
    If you mean why is it greyed out, it's because your post has been downvoted past -8. Once you hit -8 or lower, your post gets greyed out on Meta. On Main, there is a similar threshold, but it's -3 or lower.
    – Kendra
    Dec 28 '16 at 22:10
  • thanks @Kendra, your comments make me understand that people doesn't like my statement... but is true story.. i'm sorry for that!
    – Victor
    Dec 29 '16 at 15:15
  • 1
    @Victor What Cody Gray was trying to explain is that votes are different here on meta.SO than they are on SO. On SO, a downvote means "this is wrong, this doesn't answer the question...etc." and one should comment about why the downvote. On the other hand, here on meta, a downvote is perfectly fine and simply means "I don't agree with you". This doesn't require people to leave a comment to justify their point of view, it's just they don't agree with you.
    – ken2k
    Jan 4 '17 at 14:38
  • thanks @ken2k, your answer was polite. people that only downvotes and go away, is not to be considered into my account. Is just like the wind....
    – Victor
    Jan 4 '17 at 14:48

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software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/