I agree, these are the best JS docs around. I hope they continue maintaining them. The main alternative is W3 Schools, which is substantially worse (I blame their for-profit ad-supported business model, which doesn't necessarily incentivize thoroughness and depth)
Domain Age - They've been around forever with tons of materials.
Quality - good enough for most things. The newer stuff is not that bad and usually more practical(read quicker to grok for someone in a hurry) that the more thorough MDN docs.
Dirty trick - association with w3 standards body (none in reality)
They used to be really bad. Their quality has significantly increased over the past years. I will use w3schools for quick info, but MDN when I really want in-depth information.
Not sure whether it's fair to compare them. Specifications are usually written using a format language for the ones who implement them and not designed to be a learning material, so many things which are not necessary for this goal are omitted.
On the other hand references like MDN are dedicated to the end user, written with a regular language and unnecessary details removed but also with additional explanations and usage examples which are really helpful.
So one usually doesn't need to refer to the specification unless there are reasons to do it(e.g. need to understand all the aspects of a feature). It's pretty hard to understand what's written there for a beginner without some context which provided by manuals like MDN.
A while ago they established an advisory board with members from institutions with deep pockets so if Mozilla were to abandon MDN entirely, chances are we might see a more democratized version emerge, which is a good thing. I'd wait till the board meets again this month. But hey if that didn't happen, MDN content so far is fairly open - CC-BY-SA, public domain and MIT, so some kinda fork is bound to popup.
I've never come across a page on MDN I felt I could contribute to since it's so complete, but if I were to come across out of date docs I absolutely would. I imagine it's similar for a lot of folks.
Usually there are only a handful percents of overall users who actually create content compared to "read-only" users. There is nothing special about wikipedia, the same thing applies for sites like youtube,reddit, etc.
The same will apply for MDN as well, so if you haven't contributed there, this doesn't mean that nobody will.
This is the nature of any community platform [0]. Most people will just fix small issues they see or contribute a little in an area that appeals to them, and aren't interested in becoming heavily active. I don't see Wikipedia as special in this case, it's just so large that the 1% has enough critical mass to maintain it (well, mostly).
>Most people will just fix small issues they see or contribute a little in an area that appeals to them
Wikipedia makes this very difficult as well. I had to submit a small update to sales numbers for the best-selling video game franchises of all time THREE times because two separate admins reverted my edits for the most stupid reasons possible. Then they had some hand-wringing about the lack of sources (even though most of the data there wasn't sourced any better) before they stubbornly decided to stop reverting my edits. A less stubborn person would've given up editing Wikipedia after the first or even the second reversion.
Is the source data openly available, though? You can't exactly "fork" a wiki, normally. I'm concerned lots of crucial knowledge would be lost if Mozilla decided not to host it any more.
But is the content made readily available in the original markup (wiki markup, markdown, whatever), or would you have to scrape everything from the website? Wiki content is normally stored in a database, and presumably that database isn't just open to the world to query directly
Many wikis have open APIs (e.g. mediawiki instances typically do). Not sure about MDNs custom thing, but scraping is always an alternative - or even working off one of the HTML dumps available for offline use (although loosing history and original format sucks).
Theoretically since you can edit the original-format content from the website, you could scrape it from the website. I'm just wondering if this is something anybody is thinking about/working on.
W3 docs started out, and I would argue, continues to be most relevant to people whose work it is to implement a browser.
Certainly, you can use them to learn how to use the various HTML, CSS, and JS standards, but this is where MDN - and even the Chromium and Webkit resources - are leaps ahead with practical examples you can use in your own code.
Really, I wasn't sure when I wrote that. Refsnes Data, who owns/runs the site, isn't affiliated with the W3C in any official capacity that I know of.
I was thinking more of a story I heard on an old episode of Hypercritical where John described first learning HTML and the rest through a combination of (mostly) O'Reilly books and reading the specs themselves.
While I suppose this passed muster in the early/mid 90's, I would repeat my earlier claim that the specs nowadays are more for implementers, and not something really well suited to teach you how to use the various languages and tools.
Potentially losing what is perhaps the most approachable reference for this purpose would be terrible for everyone.
-- https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-micr...