[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.