[wp-hackers] StackOverflow for WordPress

[Mike Schinkel]

On May 10, 2010, at 8:08 PM, Jane Wells wrote:
> 
> Is there a reason we'd put any official Q&A on some other service instead improving our own resources at WordPress.org?

I wasn't assuming it would be "official", just a site that is available as this is now:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wordpress

> Why not put our energies into improving our own site and support services?

Because one entity can't do everything optimally?  

SE has a proven platform that is working to provide high quality answers to >7 million uniques per month. It would take WordPress.org at least a 6 months if not more realistically 18 months before having a platform that works that well, if ever.  And since the content will be licensed with Creative Commons if you do get around to building such a platform then just pull in their content and proactively route new users to your answers exchange. But in the mean time you'd actually get a better platform for supporting WordPress users. After all it's about supporting users not about protecting turf, right?

I saw the amount ($6 million) and who invested in SE and read about their changed strategy and I came to believe that SE will be very significant over the next several years. Then I realized StackOverflow had become my preferred post-google search destination for programming answers and I thought it would be great to have the same for all of WordPress.  I felt it would be better to get a strong SE for WordPress before Drupal and Joomla get a chance to do the same (since I'd rather more people use WP than those others.) 

If you feel otherwise then fine just ignore my proposal, maybe it'll go away.  I've already generated enough traffic on this list for this topic thus far today.  

-Mike