Developers May Be Getting 50% of Their Documentation From Stack Overflow 418
New submitter gameweld writes "Software companies, such as Microsoft, create documentation for millions of topics concerning its APIs, services, and software platforms. Creating this documentation comes at a considerable cost and effort. And after all this effort, much documentation is rarely consulted (citation) and lacking enough examples (citation). A new study suggests that developers are increasingly consulting Stack Overflow and crowd-sourced sites over official documentation, using it as much as 50% of time. How should official documentation be better redesigned? What are the implications of software created from unruly mashups?"
Use of Stack Overflow != Bad Documentation (Score:5, Informative)
The official documentation and message boards serve two different purposes, The official documentation should be a complete reference to the API and structure of a language. This is necessary for completeness. Stack Overflow should be used for quick real-world examples of simple tasks to be used as a starting point, or to get help with a particularly nasty bug.
We need both approaches, and the success of one, does not indicate the failure of the other.
This is not to say official documentation doesn't fail for other reasons, but killing it in favor of Stack Overflow alone is not the answer.
Re:Blame Google (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.google.com/reviews/t [google.com] is the page you can use to block a site from Google's search.