Comment by L_226
4 years ago
Potentially a stupid question; why is it not possible to just make a MediaWiki site explicitly for SO questions? Does it exist already?
4 years ago
Potentially a stupid question; why is it not possible to just make a MediaWiki site explicitly for SO questions? Does it exist already?
The technical cost/effort for someone like you or me to do that is minimal. The expensive part is the ongoing social maintenance fee aka moderation. As evident by the stack overflow drama re: Monica, it’s an unsolved (non-technical) problem that you could make your own mint to print money on, if you were able to fix any tiny part of it.
And then we would run again into people with an inflated ego, edit wars etc.
The Monica situation is probably a bad example; that was Stack Overflow (the company) royally and unilaterally messing up. It's certainly not a usual situation for resource-curating communities.
I've written, and deleted, several essays on the matter, but a TL;DR: Monica's legitimate questions to staff about a policy got caught up in a crackdown on sealioning-type harassment of trans (etc.) mods in the mod chat, and SO management basically declared war on Monica by mistake. We don't know whether they dealt with the actual harassment (though I think they did, belatedly), because if they did, proper procedure was followed and the perps weren't named-and-shamed in the press.