[CryptoGhost]

None. Most of the content on Stack Overflow is just people repeating what they heard from a more authoritative source looking for some internet points. (and often when it gets repeated it loses accuracy, context, and a real understanding of the issue at hand) There is a small subset of content that is original and not posted elsewhere but its not that common to be worried about. Often quality answers come from a person who has already published work somewhere else (eg. white paper, book, blog, documentation, etc).

[knighthack]

Completely disagree, and you're wrong.

Depending on the area you're looking into:

1. Many Stack Overflow answers do not exist in documentation at all.

2. Some answers are especially valuable because they touch issues in actual production (which are not foreseeable by documentation).

3. Answers (chronologically given) help ongoing document changes in APIs, which many documentation don't do or make it very difficult to do.

Take Python's Tkinter for instance - a lot of answers in in Stack Overflow supplement many things not covered by the official documentation. You'd either have to look at Tcl's documentation (but have no idea where to look, or how to read it), or figure out the source code yourself which will be confusing since the official documentation does not actually document every part of the library that it's sourced/ported from even though they exist for use.

4. SO answers often point you in the right direction, or to third party explanations and sources, and often compare between different semantic versions. (E.g. answers for D3 in JS often compare changes between APIs in the different versions 4, 5 and 6.) While official documentation sometimes chronicle their API changes, comparative usages/change in idiomatic usages are not always elucidated and it is in Stack Overflow that many of those are found.

[CryptoGhost]

I am wrong. For me using a dependency that can't be bothered to create proper documentation or uses SO as customer support is a non-starter.

[knighthack]

If your attitude is that you "can't be bothered" to use a dependency when there is no proper documentation, you probably aren't working on difficult problems, or you're not really doing enough serious programming work where SO becomes the only resource available to solve a hard engineering problem.

[tartoran]

There are a lot of answers to questions that authoritative sources don’t make the best job of explaining. Also, the more ways of explaining something the better in my opinion. We don’t all think on the same frequency and the more answers the more likely to find one on your own understanding. SO helped me many times when I got stuck on something. When learning something new I wouldn’t go directly there, Id use a tutorial or some authotitative reference

[inglor_cz]

That seems to me like saying that Google Search is insignificant because it only shows content from elsewhere.

[rovr138]

Google isn’t repeating as us from memory where it could loose information/context, it’s quoting verbatim.

Also, Google can be annoying when it tries to be smart and the item you really need isn’t shown due to past behavior (the bubble it creates)

Maybe that should be shown as prominent/original rank to the query done. But whatever.

[CryptoGhost]

SO suffers from it's own version of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers