[spike021]

I think SO and pure documentation would serve two separate purposes. Sometimes documentation is better for something like an internal library API or related information. But on the other hand, sometimes having a an SO-like place where I can go look up a question related to a quick thing I'm trying to do would be useful. Say I don't remember the process to build the latest version of a Java package and upload it to an internal repository or something, it might be quicker to find a related quick Q&A type doc for that rather than digging into dense documentation on a variety of things.

[colshrapnel]

And here comes the question of maintainability. For the code, we are trying to have a single repository to avoid duplicates and to have just a single place to make changes. That's what a wiki is good for. Whereas for such a dispersed knowledge base it would be hard to keep all these atomic questions up to date.

The front page for Teams boasts it's better than your "stale wikis and lost emails" but in reality there are much more stale answers on SO than anywhere else.

[always_good]

Also, in my experience, someone might proactively create a wiki page in the org documentation. But depending on the amount of logorrhea, it can be hard or discouraging for future people to change it.

Meanwhile SO answers are much more granular and easier to update for that reason.

For example, trying to transactionally update a large page on the org database system instead of an SO question about the parameters you need to connect to it. I can see SO winning here because the units of work are much smaller.