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Stack Overflow has the same problem as Wikipedia: they know the only way to scale up a human knowledge repository is by leveraging volunteer effort (the organiz
by Analemma_ 7y ago
Stack Overflow has the same problem as Wikipedia: they know the only way to scale up a human knowledge repository is by leveraging volunteer effort (the organization itself could never cost-efficiently supply the necessary manpower), but volunteers like this are strongly self-selected to be a bunch of Poindexters who take perverse joy in finding exactly which minor infraction you're guilty of and using it to shut you down. I only contributed to Wikipedia a few times before my edits were reverted under WP:OMGWTFBBQ one too many times and I stopped bothering, and I've never even bothered with SO because I've heard it's much the same.
- Fellshard 7y agoActually, the StackOverflow systems encourage that, in a gentle way, by encouraging you to slot questions into concrete categories. If you've accumulated enough cred to have access to those tools, you'll see that they present you with possibly similar questions that you can browse. Volunteers with little time and a lot of items in their queue are probably likely to notice similarities in the questions and just choose the 'identical question' option, and then move on. More detailed feedback on the question itself is hard to give, and for every one that can genuinely be improved by feedback, there's dozens that are unsalvageable, or truly are duplicates.