[kde-community] stackexange site for krita

[Laszlo Papp]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 7:57 AM, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 26 Feb 2015, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
>
>> El Dimecres, 25 de febrer de 2015, a les 17:09:09, Boudewijn Rempt va
>> escriure:
>>>
>>> This is a question that came up on the #krita channel today. Our forums
>>> are awesome, but not the best place for question and answer type of
>>> exchanges. We even see questions appear on yahoo answers!
>>>
>>> One proposal was to create a krita.stackexchange.com, like
>>> http://blender.stackexchange.com/. However, this is infra that's outside
>>> of KDE. I don't know of anything equivalent, though!
>>
>>
>> What's important of StackExchange, the non-wiki, non-forum type of
>> software they have or the users they have?
>>
>
> The software -- the way it invites people to ask questions, give answers and
> to a large extent also the way stack exchange answers show up in google. I
> mean... Try googling for a Qt programming question these days. You get
> stackexchange before the Qt documentation.

I think you are referring to Stack Overflow in there and not Stack
Exchange, at least with the Qt example, but that is just details, yes.

Let me speak up as one of the all time (top) contributors who made the
Qt tag "so successful" on Stack Exchange. I am not trying to claim
this out of pride, but more like indicating that I have some
experience about what I am talking about. I am not trying to throw
empty words out of the thin air.

Your statement seems to be very attracting to a newbie person to Stack
Exchange to read, but let me explain, based on my experience, your
statement is and should not be used as a rebruttal reasoning as how
good the site is.

First of all, as I indicated earlier, the content is many times very
low on Stack Exchange. That is due to the decline in proper moderation
Stack Exchange provides for Qt experts, or any other for that matter.

There are annoyingly the same questions asked over, over and all over
again. More often than not, there is no proper duplicate with thorough
explanation for the same question so that the rest could be closed
with redirection to it. Sometimes, newcomers would look for reputation
as part of the gaming process and so they would answer
many-times-asked questions just to get reputation, usualy with much
lower quality answers. Real experts do not get enough power to deal
with this mess, especially in not completely mainstream tags, e.g. Qt.

There are many occasions where you would need to go through 5-10 Stack
Exchange urls and yet you would not find a good answer!

However, It is worse than that: you would find many times misleading
and/or wrong answers which are even heavily upvoted. Upvoting is easy
and there are many robo upvoters, people using puppets and all that.
Yes, there is some minimal defense mechanism against puppets, but it
is really just very minimal. The algorithm is very poor.

As I mentioned, it is more of a gaming site without proper power to
eliminate well-known "rep-whore" aspect of the site in favor of
quality. Let me just point you out with one thread, the well-known
"Fastest Gun in the West Problem" among the expert "stack exchangers".
I have gone through the same problems myself many times. Just to give
you a random example, there was a question about qdoc and there was
only one answer talking about doxygen. It was highly upvoted until I
raised the issue among us, Qt contributors on Stack Exchange.
Seriously, the answer was talking about something completely
different, yet it was heavily upvoted. Some newbie even told me that
it was upvoted, so "it must have been good". Before you start claiming
that this was an exception, I am instantly writing that it was not!

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem

Please try to understand that getting to the top of Google does not
imply quality, nor free software. It implies lots of visits, etc. How
that happens and whether via quality measures and free software
channels, that is another question. You can always do a project, put a
lot of effort on marketing and apply similar tricky, but without
empowering real technology experts, you will not get quality from that
angle.

Overall, I and many people stopped contributing on Stack Exchange due
to the obvious decline in moderation. When I left answering questions,
before deciding to write a book about Qt 5 instead, the unanswered
question rate was around 37.5% and it is now around 60+%. Some fellow
Qt chaps also left around the time I did.

Oh, and have I emphasized it enough that they allow to downvote post
without reasoning on Stack Exchange? Many have spoken up against that
destructive policy and it cannot be changed. It would not be possible
to change it for KDE either since it is in the core of its operation.
I heavily and strongly disagree with that. When I get a -1 (downvote)
for a well-researched post, I would like to see the problem about it.
You know, we would be collaborating to have a useful knowledge base
for the posterity?

I mind not getting feedback just minus one and that is not just my
opinion. Not infrequently, such downvotes come from people who tried
to make some revenge after getting downvotes and explanation for their
low-quality contributions. Again, I completely disagree with some
Stack Exchange policies like that. It goes against the healthy
contribution atmosphere in my opinion.

I would have much more to share, but I do not want to bore you with
even more text in one email...

>
>
>> I.e. we're on twitter because of the users they have, having twitter-like
>> software on kde.org wouldn't work.
>>
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