Congratulations, the page is beautiful and useful.
You guys need to allow image uploads and QUIT PIGGY-BACKING.
I typed nbsp; in my answer, and the ampersand didn’t get HTML encoded!!
Jeff:
I hope you acknowledged the people at despair.com for borrowing their None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us poster design.
Regards,
Sean
I m really addicted with this great site and your are my ASP.net MVC hero.
where did you get the comment setup like this?
Averaging about one post a week. Impressive.
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Don’t understand the issues with openid. I struggled at first to learn the system but since have had no issues.
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The site is a bit elitist. I consider myself a crappy programmer and am still learning (even after 5 years out of school). The technologies are moving quickly and seems as soon as I picked up the nuances of vs2005, vs2008 came out. Anyways I’ve asked basic how to questions and received very little in the way of votes. Although I think they were valid beginner/intermediate questions.
If Software Development is a game, then that makes Stack Overflow the new World of Warcraft.
If StackOverflow is the new World of Warcraft, then I’m a undead shadowpriest.
I am now in a quandry… I endeavour to be a good Stacker and am remaining anonymous because people are abusing their power.
One thread was closed using not programming related when the question was in reality a design related question.
The person who closed it had posted about what mouse should i use (superfluously added a as a programmer like a mouse helps you code - or - What workplace exercises do you do?
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander …
On the other hand give Justin a Platinum Badge … and list his rep as a mobius … 
What a great idea!
I wish you all the success in the world.
I’ve never been that interested in grind based MMORPG:s, but this is different. I’m actually interacting with other players all the time, and it’s not just about grinding mobs or something: We’re questing to find real world coding answers to gain Badges!
I just can’t stop refreshing the front page to see if I’ve earned some more ‘rep’ :))))
Seriously: good show. I really hope this works out ok, and it’s looking phenomenal so far.
You raise good questions. Success and failure are both in your hands…
I think there’s multiple issues and multiple opportunities. From an information standpoint, the challenge of having multiple chefs in the pot can break conceptual integrity. But it can also lead to a sum that’s more than the parts.
When Ward Cunningham (father of the Wiki) was on my team, he taught me lots about Wikis and community. Lots of little insights that add up. For example:
- page names matter
- think one great page at a time
- garden tenders matter - a lot
- the community becomes self-maintaining eventually, if you groom the right rules
- your best community members become your best garden tenders
- forums are about time; wikis are timeless
What surprised me is how much that the network behind the community matters more than the online site itself. The online becomes a reflection of the connection.
Personally, I’m a big fan of Wikis. I’ve created many dozens, in many shapes, sizes, and platforms. My personal favorite is still Wikimedia. I created Guidance Share (http://www.GuidanceShare.com ) using Wikimedia to experiment different ways of organizing massive amounts of information. There’s no way I could get that experience in a book or blog. But, blogs and books have their purpose. A blog is great as a chunked stream of value over time and for news. A book is a great path through a bunch of information. But I would expect the book to be focused on the durable, evolvable frames and key principles, patterns, and practices – not the volatile information that’s better in a Wiki.
Which brings me to the other success factor – the information structure itself. I won’t claim to be an information management guru. But I have managed several thousands of pages over several years. What I learned is that the most important thing is to treat a body of knowledge as a catalog of types and topics. If you find the right information structures, it’s very easy to share knowledge effectively. For example, I make heavy use of how tos, guidelines, checklists, explaines, practices at a glance, … etc. At a high-level, I factor reference from action. I put reference into nuggets I call Explained. I put action into step by step How Tos.
My favorite approach is to slice a domain into a knowlege base (KB) of nuggets and a guide. Here’s examples:
- KB - VSTS Guidance (http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSGuidance)
- Guide - Team Development with TFS (http://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide)
I’ve tried to explain as best I could, in short form, how I build books in patterns practices, so this may help you structure your knowledge (http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/12/24/building-books-in-patterns-amp-practices.aspx)
You might also want to experiment with Guidance Explorer (http://www.codeplex.com/guidanceExplorer). Customers call it ITunes for knowledge. You can read, author, and share guidance nuggets. You can build customized views of guidance as well as build your own guide on the fly. It’s actually a mini platform of a guidance store, a guidance feed, and an offline client guidance explorer.
I think your model of bringing together a KB (wki), news (blog), people (forum) and user sharing (digg/reddit) makes sense. I haven’t tested the full enchilada, but it matches variations of models I’ve had success with.
I have some information on what I call guidance engineering which may help you in terms of thinking through models as well as figuring out practices (for example, one of my favorite practices is sweeping the KB – knowledge isn’t static. Over time it gets out of whack. A periodic sweep makes a big difference). You can browse my guidance engineering posts here http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/tags/Guidance+Engineering/default.aspx.
Good luck (where luck is when skill and opportunity come together)
PS - sorry so long, but I didn’t have time to write a short comment.
I like Stackoverflow. I still think it has a ways to go, especially in the areas of accessibility to new users (the FAQ has almost nothing in it!) and finding questions to answer (ok, there’s an unanswered questions tab, but how about questions with no accepted answer, or questions with no answers over 1 vote?), but I find that even at this early stage I’ve gotten a lot more help there than I have elsewhere.
Look promising. Only snags now is not having some filters (boolean or tag-cloud navigation) for the vast amount of questions. I also hope the use of OpenID gets re-evaluated.
As mentioned above, a seperate login for stackoverflow.uservoice.com that’s not using OpenID somehow beats it’s purpose?
Opso70, you say 1) Don’t understand the issues with openid. I struggled at first to learn the system but since have had no issues.
You do understand the issues with openID then.
Why should something as simple as logging onto a sodding website involve struggling and having to learn the system?
It staggers me that people say that then say they don’t see what the problem is.
I know StackOverflow is for programming questions - and it’s pretty good for that - but is there any chance we could have something similar for sysadmin questions?
I have fun questions like I’m running obscure third-party addin to Word and other obscure third-party addin to Word at the same time and they don’t seem to like each other. Any suggestions what kind of trace I can run to see where the problem is?
I really love this article.Its so well written.Nice statement
I’ve always felt guilty about having taken from the community more than I’ve given. I want StackOverflow to succeed and will do what I can to help it succeed. Thank you for making it available. I’ve tried posting to my blog answers to problems that took me a while to resolve. I’ll start posting to StackOverflow as well. I think the site will improve as more editors get their wings and start cleaning up the mess. The mess being partially, all the subjective questions that aren’t in the spirit of the site, that encourage discussion but creates noise.
yeah well said…liked your topic pretty influencing 