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Comment by mlewisTW | Hacker News Reader

Do users earn reputation for voting to close off-topic questions? Maybe they have poorly incentivized their users to close questions rather than answer them.

Why do people put up with this? Because there's not a better option. Want to make one?

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Stack Exchange could be much better. They have created a good model, however the knowledge needs to be aggregated back into a documentation format, that is browsable. Documentation + Q&A together = Awesomeness.

What do you mean documentation + question and answer? Like a wiki with Q&A?

I completely agree that Documentation + Q&A together = Awesomeness. My first programming language was PHP, which I self taught to myself using only the online documentation. Without the comments at the bottom of every page of documentation, the learning process would have taken a lot longer. I haven't looked at the PHP documentation in years, but I hope that the discussions still exist. I'm surprised that more documentation doesn't have the same kind of commenting system, or every a better one... from what I can remember the discussions on the PHP documentation were single threaded and didn't have any user moderation. I also recall people commenting and saying "Don't listen to Bob's comment above! It's completely wrong!! Here's how you do it: ..." followed by: "Steve has it almost correct, but you should really use X instead of Y.", followed by 10 more comments with no real conclusion on how to "correctly" query a mysql database. If there was a Stack Exchange type of Q&A that was embedded on each individual page of documentation, that might be very useful.

In due time, this will exist. The interactive documentation (a wiki on steroids) will merge many existing systems into one platform that is unparalleled. I plan to make this system, I just need to figure out where to start, and organize a team.

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