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Comment by tekkk | Hacker News Reader

My question is, is this better than your self-hosted wiki? At least that's cheaper and isn't a vendor lock-in. Sure wiki doesn't have the best possible UI and the UX might be too so-and-so. If I were in a position to buy this kind of service I'd still want something more out of it.

Maybe if it offered a way to export Slack threads into SO as questions so they wouldn't get lost. Sure you could generate those questions manually from the thread and maybe prune them a little but I've found mostly people are too lazy for extra-work like that. Anyway that's my first impression, take it as you want.

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If your goal is to post problems and associated solutions, yes it is better than a Wiki.

First, it gives you a template to post in - you are not given a blank page and told "document this"

Second, it encourages you to document single, smaller, focused pieces of information. You're not being asked or expected to write a multipage document, you're being asked to write a single entry in what essentially is a crowd sourced FAQ.

One thing the SO approach also does is that it respects the content that each person posts. If I post an answer, only I can modify it. Nobody will modify my answer to reflect what they think, and make it seem as if I was presenting a different solution that what I suggested. What people with alternative ideas CAN do though is post alternative answers, or comment on my answer with suggested changes.

> If I post an answer, only I can modify it.

Teams users won't be able to edit answers?

Well, I'm assuming it works like Stack Overflow. I can edit my own posts, but not those of others. Only high reputation moderators have the ability to edit other people's posts.

Here's how we coach moderators on the internal Stack-like site we run...

Editing

When editing content written by others, do so with respect to the person who is the original author of the content. Correct simple spelling and grammatical errors, but don't rewrite whole sentences or restructure some else's document. Instead, post a comment suggesting changes or corrections.

It's the same as stack overflow. Any user can make an edit and it goes into a review queue.

If your goal is to post, then SO is excellent. But if your goal is also to read, there are questions. Nobody ever tried to use Stack Overflow without Google yet. given all its bell and whistles are intended for those who want to post, there are questions yet to answer.

I use SO without Google sometimes, in this way: I search for a phrase or tag, and read the 20 - 30 highest upvoted questions & answers about that — and I learn a lot, sometimes things that I didn't know, that I ought to know.

We're looking into just that type of Slack integration here in the next couple of months.

Nearly every company I've worked at is already paying for a vendor locked-in wiki. Of course, ADDING StackOverflow means they're now paying for TWO vendor locked-in wikis (at least until they can shut down the old one, if ever), but it may be still be a net improvement.

FWIW, Stack Overflow for Teams isn't a wiki.

Its creator would disagree with you. [1]

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-...

That's Joel's version of link bait headline. It works nothing like a wiki. But of course, you already know that if you've used Stack Overflow. But, tomato, tomato.

wi·ki noun

    a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users.

StackOverflow is a website that allows users to edit the content of questions, answers, and tags. It also allows users to write new questions, new answers, and close existing questions and answers. How is that "nothing like a wiki"?

Stack overflow was originally more like a wiki, with everything editable. Over time things got more immutable and marking questions as "community wiki" by default started being discouraged.

An question/answer doesn't have to be marked "community wiki" for you to edit it.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack-o...

In his post here, he kind of directly writes that SO is not like a wiki.

> But you know what does work? A Q&A system. Like Stack Overflow. > Why? Because unlike wikis, you don’t write documentation in the hopes that one day it might help someone.

"Because unlike wikis.."

In the exact quote you gave, he says that SO is different from "wikis" in that the question is written before the answer.

When most people think "wiki", seeing answers before questions is certainly a common characteristic they could assign to the concept, but it's not what makes it a "wiki".

I could design a wiki that was text-only and say, "unlike wikis, we don't present photos", but that wouldn't make it not-a-wiki.

Has there ever been a self-hosted wiki that was good? I'm only half joking - we've been through a few of them, and never found anything that was easy enough to use that people actually would. And thus everything gets shoved into email, and perpetually lost.

I'm actually kind of excited about the idea of an internal StackOverflow. Of course, people would have to actually use it, and that battlefield is littered with the shattered corpses of a million productivity and communication and social tools.

We used mailing list per topic (think channels) that anyone could subscribe to, and piper mail for searchable archives, and a $100 bounty for every relevant topic turned into a GFM document (with guidelines for minimal structure w.r.t. pros and cons and whats, whys and hows). Seemed to work. Of course this was before people discovered Slack, destroyer of institutional knowledge.

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