3

Update:

Kevin provided an answer, which, while adding something of value to the three related questions together (by naming the originating concern eventually), actually does not apply to the question at hand. So to further stress the issue I'd like to provide an alternate phrasing with his response in mind:

Is it really worth to police something prematurely, which hasn't been identified to be a problem yet, for the sake of the policy itself, thereby sacrificing the upmost motivation to improve API/library documentation (as well as the liberal ongoing community self-regulation regarding the exploration of proper API/library documentation)?

Assuming for a moment that their really might be an argument important enough to warrant moderator intervention to consider dev-tip posts to be reputation farming at some point in the future and require them to be community wiki therefore immediately, would it really be worth to discourage substantive illustrative guidance of API/library usage nowadays already for the sake of a couple of reputation points in a distant future?

George Edison: I have set up a small MediaWiki installation here:

http://stackoverflow.quickmediasolutions.com/wiki/

Feel free to add / edit pages to document API usage. All the content on the site is CC licensed so you can copy (with attribution of course) the stuff in the existing dev-tip questions.

Improve this question

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
2

Honestly, I don't think it is a big enough deal to warrant all of this attention. I don't see why posting code samples should be Community Wiki, but if a Moderator believes that they should be, then that's fine.

It was getting a bit annoying to see C# code samples posted all over the active question's page. I think a few is ok, but in my opinion, it was getting a bit out of hand.

Documentation of the libraries should not be on this site. This site is here to talk about the API that is provided by Stack Overflow Internet Services, not the implementation of that API in other languages.

Improve this answer

12 Comments

Re moderation: while I don't think that arbitrary moderator decisions are just fine, I'd certainly simply accept them as (unfortunate) facts of life and adjust my participation accordingly if this moderation 'policy' would have been stated upfront - however, constantly stressing the importance of and encouraging community discussions only to ignore it at personal discretion later on I do consider to be impolite at best ...
Re C# dominance: couldn't you just ignore those topics tags then? I certainly see your point and we would all benefit from a balanced representation of various client technologies, but do you think it is fair to introduce artificial throttles just because some users seem to be more active than others while still providing useful content?
Re documentation: that is certainly something we could talk about and reach some sort of consensus eventually (i.e. I'm not opposed to this at all). However, the majority of the posts in question, no matter whether in C# or not, do provide guidance on how to deal with limitations and/or design artifacts of the API itself by implicitly exposing an appropriate algorithm, e.g. I've already translated code poets C# sample to Java two times already for use with your library, which I'm using for some prototypes incidentally ;)
Re Mod: @Steffen, I can agree that Kevin may have acted too quickly. Decisions like that should be discussed before they are made. My guess is that Kevin didn't think his actions would be received so negatively.
Re C#: @Steffen No, I like the dev tips, but the most recent ones were only examples of C# code. I have no idea where he finds the time to work on SOAPI so much, but it was just overwhelming for me. I think in the long-run the dev-tips are great. But so many, in such quick succession was just too much.
|
2

As Jeff mentioned in the comment of my other answer, this information would be best put elsewhere... so...

I have set up a MediaWiki installation for this here:

http://stackoverflow.quickmediasolutions.com/wiki/

Update: The stackoverflow.quickmediasolutions.com subdomain appears to have been dead for a while.
Here's what's left of the wiki at the Internet Archive.

Improve this answer

7 Comments

a little less talk, a little more action... good work. although an area 51 site cough area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/10133 cough would be a really good solution as well....
@code: Oh well... :) Based on the progress of the proposal, I think this will serve as a good place to collaborate in the meantime. Please take a look and see if my attribution of your code is proper... I want to get it done right.
@code: Also, my knowledge of wiki-formatting is rather poor, so any help in regards to that would be greatly appreciated.
Looks fine to me. But... this site is still the most direct path of discovery and the concept or value of a dev-tip is not in question. The current discussion is over whether the authors of dev-tips should gain rep from their peers for their efforts. and while I applaud your agile reaction I am not sure that it would not be a duplication of efforts and not the most direct path of discovery. I would probably suggest letting the dust settle and see how the forced CW on dev-tips pans out. Either way, here or there, there is no rep to be gained and there are more eyes here. does that make sense?
@code: True... this is not really a solution to the CW problem, but rather your Area51 problem. This is a temporary (or semi-permanent) stand-in for your proposal. Feel free to edit away and make it useful.
|
1

Having earned some rep. from the "dev-tip" questions myself, I can honestly say that I probably would not have put in the effort knowing I would never get rep. from it.

I think the CW-requirement needs to be relaxed :)

Improve this answer

10 Comments

ooohh an anonymous downvoter. must be one of a 'fair number of people'
see Kevin's answer. This is simply not the correct site or format for that information.
@Jeff: Fair enough. I added another answer with my solution which should work for everyone hopefully.
@Jeff, why does it matter, it's not like Stackapps has the same demand or volume as stackoverflow. It seems it's only you and Kevin who think that it should've been changed, so why change it? At the end of the day it's a number on a computer, not money or some life changing value, so why waste the time changing the system that people, who actually use the site, made.
@Jonathan: Well, if they think it doesn't belong... that's their choice. Look at my other answer for a possible compromise.
|
-2

Poll style question have long been made "Community Wiki" on our sites. Note that the [dev-tip] questions changed were all of the form "Post your solution to X," a poll question. We had let this slide in the past, but the recent rash of (I'm sure, innocuous) posts brought the issue back to the forefront.

Furthermore, there's already a place for your [library] docs... the [library] question.

Consider it a policy, posting example code not in response to an explicit question should be Community Wiki. Answering a question, posting an [app] or [library], suggesting a feature, or similar should remain "owned."

Improve this answer

15 Comments

I tend to disagree, this is not a poll style question to me - I'm not a native speaker, but a poll asks for opinionated content regarding something (i.e. 'best', 'worst', 'funniest' etc.). This is an invitation to document API/library usage against a particular use case. Answering to one of these can take a considerable amount of time and respective software engineering effort, and no reader will be inclined to vote something up simply because he likes it most or prefers it over another, rather only if the example turns out to be useful guidance regarding the use case at hand.
Or to put it another way: please contemplate that this might simply be a type of question not existing before, just as Stack Apps is a type of site with noticeably different characteristics (unfortunately, but that's another topic). Of course these could be added to the library in question as well, but are you really suggesting that we should build a complete library handbook as answers to the one library post instead of providing easily discoverable use cases where solutions in the library of your choice might hopefully be deduced from others if absent?
Finally -1 for not answering my question. Thanks for responding to 1 out of 3 related questions at least, but I can't help but notice that you are not answering the question(s) at hand, rather try to get away with something else. If anything, your answer could have been a starting point regarding the acceptable moderation or reputation farming issues. However, here I stressed that whatever argument you might come up with, whether this would warrant discouraging welcome and useful posts, see update for more on this.
@Steffen - "poll style" means no correct answer, which the CW'd [dev-tip] posts definitely fell under. Bluntly, those posts were blatant rep-farming; because they weren't garbage, I CW'd them instead of deleting them since that seemed like an acceptable compromise (on any other site, they would have been deleted I'm quite sure; certainly after the 2nd one). I guess in the future I should just delete them since the rep is apparently all any cares about (as opposed to the post content, which was unaltered), and there can be no compromise there...
...and Jon Skeet could post spam if he wanted to anyway.
|

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.