4 ms·

First of all a personal heartfelt "thank you" to you for contributing towards open-source project. It's because of people like you, who rise above the personal

by tmptmp 10y ago

First of all a personal heartfelt "thank you" to you for contributing towards open-source project. It's because of people like you, who rise above the personal benefits to a significant extent and contribute to the open/free source movement, the people like me from the third-world can hope to learn anything significant without fearing about the costs involved. So I do appreciate your concern about SO grabbing all the credit due out there, but I politely wish to point out the need of better documentation of various open/free projects: The most important reason for me at least: The great RTFM famed man pages are the worst place to learn anything about how to use a particular tool for a newcomer because most of the times man pages lack good and varied examples. To quote Einstein, "Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach." - Albert Einstein [1] I have suffered endless time trying to learn things from man-pages. Spent time asking questions on forums until the expert people there saw the need to give some examples and offered help. I also thank them all. SO documentation can add much needed value for the newcomers here as experts can add examples and newcomers can find them at one place. This one is the greatest reason I support efforts like SO documentation project. Of course, I don't underplay the great work the open/free source contributors are doing. It may be the case that the great experts, may not find time to write down examples that a newcomer may need and the needs vary from one newcomer to another: One size doesn't fit all. The distributed crowd-sourcing model nature of SO can tackle this problem in a much better way, unless the truly open efforts like archive.org or gnu.org come ahead with hosting solutions like this. [1] http://www.alberteinsteinsite.com/quotes/einsteinquotes.html http://www.alberteinsteinsite.com/quotes/einsteinquotes.html

pietroalbini 10y ago
The documentation of a lot of projects is really bad, I know, and something is needed to improve it. I think though the efforts spent on duplicating documentation on SO is just wasted: why don't you contribute back to the canonical one? Usually maintainers are just happy to merge new documentation chapters or examples.
- Flimm 10y ago
  Just editing something on Stack Overflow is much quicker than git cloning something, figuring out the documentation build that they have, editing, issuing a pull request, watching that pull request linger for ages, get a nit-picking comment, fix it, watch it linger for ages, and then finally merged, but not released, and then waiting for ages for the release. Obviously, sometimes the experience is better than that, and sometimes it's worse, but SO Q&A is much more consistent and immediate, and I imagine SO Docs will be as well.

by tmptmp 10y ago

pietroalbini 10y ago

The documentation of a lot of projects is really bad, I know, and something is needed to improve it. I think though the efforts spent on duplicating documentation on SO is just wasted: why don't you contribute back to the canonical one? Usually maintainers are just happy to merge new documentation chapters or examples.

Flimm 10y ago
Just editing something on Stack Overflow is much quicker than git cloning something, figuring out the documentation build that they have, editing, issuing a pull request, watching that pull request linger for ages, get a nit-picking comment, fix it, watch it linger for ages, and then finally merged, but not released, and then waiting for ages for the release. Obviously, sometimes the experience is better than that, and sometimes it's worse, but SO Q&A is much more consistent and immediate, and I imagine SO Docs will be as well.