Comment by slightwinder

> I think this shows an example of a big problem with StackOverflow compared to its initial vision. I remember listening to Jeff and Joel's podcast, and hearing the vision of applying the Wikipedia model to tech Q&A. The idea was that answers would continue to improve over time.

Interessting. As a random visitor this was something that never came to me from the way SO presents itself.

> For the most part, they don't. I'm not quite sure if it's an issue of incentives or culture.

I think it's more a problem of communication and UI. SO is not really the kind of site that animates people to answer or improve things. The overall design is also more technical and strange, not motivating and userfriendly.

Today for the first time I realized that there is a history for answers and an "improve"-Button that seems to allow me to change someone else answer. I only saw that because I expliciet looked for this because of this thread.

Wikipedia in the beginning was very vocal and motivating to engage all kind people to help and improve articles. SO never had that vibes for me. Additionally, it simply has not the interface that makes it simple to do this stuff. There are only this aweful comments under each answer, which are not really useful to discus an answer in all lenght and from all sides. Might be better to change them to a full fletched forum with some kollaboration editing and some small wiki-functionality or something like that.

I remember they tried to do some kind of wiki with high quality-code-parts, what happend to that?