Solar wrote:
The OS related questions, and the discussion about them, is what is at the very core of this community. Putting it away somewhere will leave this board pretty much deserted.
It would change the forums dramatically, but as long as there is a desire for community and subjective discussion, it won't turn into a ghost town.
Speaking for myself, I rarely participate in forum discussions anymore, outside of these existential meta-discussions. This is because of the signal-to-noise ratio, not just from beginners asking repetitive questions, but from all the flames that seem to ensue. It's just a complete waste of my time to go digging through all this. I want to go to a forum where I can actually learn something new and have a design discussion with other experts.
I've always thought that
Lambda the Ultimate is a good model to follow in terms of the level of maturity and expertise of its users. They achieve this through very strict and impersonal moderation (they tend to just remove posts rather than lecture people), and by having very complex subject matter.
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
If you want to know how to do XYZ in programming language ABC, you go to SO. If you want to know how to design a better programming language or the theory behind programming languages, you go to Lambda the Ultimate. There is room on the Internet for both. I believe it's the same with OSDev.
Solar wrote:
Also, the questions, and the discussion about them, is one of two things that's feeding the Wiki. Having those things happening on SO means there'll be little feedback into the Wiki from that front (because no-one will browse the "osdev" category of SO to look at what's a FAQ or what might be lacking from the Wiki).
Wikis tend to be maintained by a core group of dedicated editors. Not every passerby gets involved. The people contributing to the wiki today will not forget about it just because a lot of OSDev questions start showing up on SO.
As for FAQs, it's easier to see what the most popular questions are on SO because of the voting system. Those questions that have complicated answers that would benefit from more explanation and deeper cross-linking with other topics could be explored further on the wiki.
Solar wrote:
The general SO community isn't about kernel-space coding, and I fear there might be much repetitive noise on that kind of questions ("why bother", "use Linux" and their ilk).
If anyone gave answers like "why bother" and "use Linux" on SO, it would get voted down really fast. That's the beauty of their system.
Solar wrote:
Get me right: It might actually work, and make SO into the prime resource for OSDev related information. But effectively it could mean we close doors on this community here. Do we want that?
While I don't believe that would happen, if I had to choose, I would rather have:
- The entire worldwide community of programmers able to participate in answering OSDev questions
- A fair, impartial, impersonal, and non-judgemental system for moderation (instead of imperfect human mods that sometimes lose their objectivity and sense of diplomacy), and
- An effective way to filter out the noise so that we can see the very best questions and answers quickly and easily.
However, I think it's actually a false choice: We can continue to have our community here, as well as Q&A on StackOverflow.