[kde-community] stackexange site for krita

[Laszlo Papp]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Dweeble <dweeble01103 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Feb 2015 06:36:48 -0500, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Martin Klapetek
>> <martin.klapetek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Anyone btw. knows how the Ubuntu instance at askubuntu.com fits in?
>>
>>
>> It is part of the Stack Exchange system. You can easily check it by
>> going to a Stack Exchange account that has subaccounts on multiple
>> sites including AU. The "subdomains" are listed at the top of left an
>> account. Furthermore, the Stack Exchange logo is even in the "banner"
>> on the top left of the cover page for AU.
>>
>>> I wonder if it is hosted by Canonical or just by SE Inc. and running
>>> on its own domain...and if Ubuntu people got more power in the moderation
>>> and stuff.
>>
>>
>> Well, surely, they are slightly more empowered on a separate site, but
>> in the end of the day, as Omar also wrote, the big boss is Stack
>> Exchange. I want KDE to be the big boss for a KDE project. I really do
>> not want to compromise that.
>>
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> --
>>> Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
>>>
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>>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
>>
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>
>
> I don't see where this is so much better than what exists - to me it looks
> like a forum without sub-forums, where (at least on the LO and Ubuntu sites)
> not that many people vote and "answers" are basically posts.

Sorry, but this is simply not true. You can say that questions and
answers, with comments left around, look like forum, but that is not
the intended goal of these Q/A sites. I personally do not like the end
resulf of the forums. There is a lot of messy noise left around for
the posterity. It is a bit challenging to go through all the posts and
grab the important bits. It is possible, but it is not ideal.

Now, coming back to your observation, if that is what you observed on
SE, that is sad. I have seen it many times myself, too, though that
noisy comments are left around, which were useful for the time, but
not after submitting the "final" answer.

On the contrary, forum is more like a different form of mailing list
or IRC for me, where the discussion can be publicly pinned down. But
that is quite different from only concentrating on the "end result".

> And
> surprisingly considering the size of the Ubuntu community there aren't as
> many answers as I would have expected.

Fair enough and that is not just the AU community. It is an overall
issue for many technology areas on SE.

> I would think making the existing facilities better would be more cost/labor
> efficient and imo and what would be a worthy  goal in supporting the
> community would be is to provide responses to all questions asked on the
> Forum, if one looks at the number of unanswered questions that number should
> not be considered acceptable.

Yes, I agree.

There is also the thing that the LaTeX Stack Exchange and
latex-community.org experts say: you cannot answer every questions
either if many questions are very low quality.

Stack Exchange is a commercial entity with closed source software
(although "open" database to be fair) and their own business model. I
do not think it is inline with KDE's vision, but the KDE community may
disagree with me, for sure.

Either way, Stack Exchange has been known among many experts that it
would mostly concentrate on quantity to sell to their customers. They
can show all the fancy stats to their customers that "we have now X
million questions, etc". This is one of their policy decisions which,
while I respect, I do not agree with.

Let me please get back a bit to the "First Google results are Stack
Exchange results, beating even the official documentations, so it must
be really cool".

To make my opinion clear and explicit, I think it is disadvantageous
that Stack Exchange is indexed that well on Google. It is leading
towards the "vendor lock-in" mode for the Q/A world and if someone
tries to get out of that, that person would be always told off by this
argument. In fact, I would honestly suggest Google to find a better
algorithm to avoid this situation, but I understand it may not be in
Google's best interest.

Also, it is quite inconvenient to find Stack Exchange results at times
on the top if they are not good enough and e.g. the official
documentation is good enough. In those cases, it is a pity that the
official documentation or something better than Stack Exchange answers
is not on the top... A good example would be an expert's blog.

I trust and truly believe that the free software world needs to
challenge Stack Exchange to avoid vendor lock-in by non-free software
for a very important use case.

>
> Google01103 (I hang at the Forum occasionally)
>
>
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