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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

At least in my opinion it is not and it should not be the goal of StackOverflow to duplicate the documentation of programming languages, libraries or what ever - there is just no value in that. It is of course something different if there is no or only bad documentation but this is just not the case for a lot of questions asked. I have absolutely no sympathy for people that are to lazy to look at the documentation and instead make other people do it for them copying or restating the relevant parts on StackOverflow.

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I really don't understand your apparent point of view that redundancy in documentation is somehow a bad thing. It's great that you like good canonical API documentation, I do too. But it's also great that some people find easier solutions to common problems more quickly using the Q&A format of SO.

There is value in duplicating documentation even wholesale and unmodified, if different duplicates are easier for some people to find and use, but there's even more value in "duplicating" documentation by presenting it differently, which is what SO is doing, even for many questions that you believe to be trivial. The more the merrier, if you ask me.

Now, of course, it would suck if you felt lazy people with already-answered questions were wasting your time. Then I would understand your point of view. But the fact is that you just don't have to answer their questions. If somebody else does answer it, well then that person probably didn't feel like it was a waste of time.

I understand your position.

Presumably SO wants to maximize its readership. What I've seen is that they allow any programming question, even of trivial nature, as long as it's objective not subjective. I like that and think it's a good way to maximize readership for objective stuff, because I often google for trivial things. For example, Powershell if/else/elseif syntax, if I haven't used Powershell in a while. I just found the syntax on SO within 10 seconds, with an example I can copy/paste/modify. I bet a lot of other developers use SO like that too, and I bet it's largely the reason people put trivial questions on there. My motivation is efficiency. Being efficient can be construed as lazy I guess!

I do the same - if the first search result is on StackOverflow I will of course just look at that. But if the first result is not on StackOverflow I will read whatever is there and not ask a question on StackOverflow unless the answer to my problem is not or hard to find. So in essence I am uncomfortable if people don't try hard enough to find the answer in existing sources. How long hard enough takes obviously depends on the context. For something I am an expert in I can conclude after a few hours that I have to ask. If you for example start learning your first programming language I would expect you to try at least a day, probably even a couple of days to find the solution by reading manuals, tutorials and books before you ask a question.

Agreed, I don't ask trivial questions myself.

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