Re: Thoughts about creating Stack Exchange page?

[David Kastrup]

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> "when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a
> nail".  Mailing lists are an all-purpose communication tool.  Many
> things can be done using a mailing list, but some things may be done
> more efficiently using other tools - for example, most of us thinks
> that reviewing patches via email is inconvenient, so we use Rietveld.

It's not clear that the turnout is actually better.  There is no
question that, say, the Linux kernel development manages quite fine with
reviewing a lot more patches a lot more thoroughly via Email than we
manage using Rietveld.

> Q&A sites like StackExchange are better for sharing Q&A knowledge than
> mailing lists because they allow to edit information, update it,
> remove duplicates, and make order.  When searching lilypond mailing
> list archives, i sometimes get two dozen of different answers, most of
> which is irrelevant (because it's impossible to find good keywords for
> the search; StackExchange offers muhc better search), and the other
> half is scattered all over the place, works only in some LilyPond
> versions, and the code is scattered too - for example, some functions
> written by David N and Harm are updated so many times over so many
> email threads that it's really hard to find the latest version.

Which is the reason the latest version tends to be in LilyPond proper.
At any rate, it sounds like it's not the medium as such that is the
problem but rather the indexing capabilities of the archives.  There are
a few partly competing archives, like Gmane, Nabble, of course the
upstream archive, and a few others.  There is not much competition with
StackExchange: it's take it or leave it.

-- 
David Kastrup