I can't remember if it was Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood who said this, but the analogy they used was Stack Overflow is supposed to be the college, not the quad.

I can't remember if it was Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood who said this, but the analogy they used was Stack Overflow is supposed to be the college, not the quad. There we're plenty of unstructured discussions at the time, very few sites dedicated to the creation and cataloging of information.