Re: Thoughts about creating Stack Exchange page?

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi,

my 3 eurocents:

1) StackExchange is great.  It's Q&A style of sharing knowledge is
very efficient and pleasure to work with.

2) LilyPond is too small to have its own StackExcange site.  If you look at
http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/10733/leaving-beta-requirements
you'll see that the expected questions/day ratio is 15.  We're
significantly below this limit.  I've looked around on area51 and my
general impression is that we're definitely too small with regard to
other metrics as well (number of users, etc).  I suggest to return to
this discussion in 3 years.

3)
2013/11/2 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
> Gilberto Agostinho <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I am also totally up for this idea as well. [StackExchange for LilyPond]
>
> What's wrong with this list?  Everybody wants to take his LilyPond
> business to the web interface of his choice that takes a lot of
> additional work over just reading and typing text and further dilutes
> the LilyPond knowledge.

"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.
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.

However, things are still manageable with the mailing list because
we're not that big.  If there was 10x more traffic, i imagine that a
mailing list would become an unholy mess - and coincidentally, with
10x more traffic we would be big enough for a StackExchange site.

So, i'd love to see LilyPond on StackExchange, but we may think about
it only when we get 10x bigger.

best,
Janek