[FreeKill]

I wonder if something more like a wiki format would be better long term. Say you take a question like "How to loop through a list of key,value pairs in JavaScript. Through the last 10 years, this has changed a lot through vanilla to libraries like jquery to new iterations like ES5/6. What I would love to see is just a page with this question asked, maintained over time with an emphasis on when the previous solution was relevant, and highlighting the most recent, preferred options for solving the problem.

So, rather than a score based social network style system, turn the questions into living, and evolving documents. Also, sometimes a person gets stuck having to work on code that's a decade old, so it would be nice to have a history as well, and not just the most recent solution that may not work in their environment.

[saurik]

The irony is that that is actually what StackOverflow is: you can edit any question to make it clearer... and you end up leaving the original person's name on it (which I frankly find kind of evil).

[mhh__]

The irony of all of this is that stackoverflow works just fine 95% of the time.

[to11mtm]

This doesn't sound bad on the surface, but my worry would be that we would wind up with Wiki-style moderation instead of SO style moderation. i.e. 'guarded articles', edit wars and power-mods overriding outside consensus.

[LordDragonfang]

Instead of SO style moderation, with closed questions being treated as canonical, corrected information buried in comments, and power-mods overriding outside consensus?

[wpietri]

Have you done much editing on Wikipedia? That seems like an optimistic view of what the experience would be.

[notriddle]

Wikipedia isn't perfect, but they get one thing right that Stack Overflow gets horribly wrong: they make it obvious who the audience is.

A lot of people visiting Stack Overflow think that the purpose of a Stack Overflow question is to solve the OP's problem. They write "Dear Libby" style letter templates into the question box, and often provide very opinionated answers that try to give way more advice than was strictly asked for by trying to infer what's "really going on" based on the subtext of the question. And there's a lot of UI in there that encourages seeing it as an advice column.

But the Stack Overflow people themselves don't want it to be a place to seek general advice. They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.

It is not a surprise that people feel cheated.

[jakecopp]

A wiki curated from stack overflow answers would be amazing!

StackOverflow powered GPT-3 haha.