[development] Drupal Answers: A Stackoverflow/StackExchange site proposal

[Carl Wiedemann]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 12:40 PM, Blake Senftner <bsenftner at earthlink.net>wrote:

> Something I've not seen in these discussions is the api.drupal.org site.
>
>
Maybe because there's not as big a demand for improvements on API? :) I
would suggest we focus on one piece at a time.

The audiences and purposes of API and the StackExchange idea seem very
different. For example, participation is ancillary to API whereas it is
essential to the StackExchange. API attempts to answer "What" and
StackExchange is often "How/Why." I would also suggest that users of API
more often know exactly what they want to find, while StackExchange is less
uniform -- users may not know what they are trying to find at first, they
could be just traversing topics or googling.  Additionally, I for one,
prefer the simplicity of API, and rarely read the comments. While some sort
of voting system *could* help the commentary on API, we risk convolving the
purposes of these numerous channels.

Inasmuch, to build upon Josh's and jcisio's comments, there seems to be (at
least) three ideas floating around here -- "Support" vs "Answers" vs
"Documentation." You might also consider "Documentation" to be two-fold --
Handbook pages and API pages could fall under this umbrella yet both have
different content and goals.

I think we can all agree that the StackExchange model is useful, but let's
not paint with so broad a brush quite yet when it comes to the other
channels.
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