August 9, 2023 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Wrong is Stack Overflow?
August 9, 2023 at 6:34 am
I've been banging on about librarianship for years.
When I write pages on Confluence I have a number of standard templates, all of which have a header table with a minimum of 3 mandatory properties
The idea is to convey at a glance how relevant the page is.
That is all well and good but it is only useful if people do review the pages, do update the three properties, do correct the pages. It also helps if there are mechanical processes to highlight pages last reviewed over x months ago. In my experience the people processes aren't supported or enforced and the mechanical processes are on a "sometime maybe never" list.
I spend a huge amount of time on software archeology. I have to do this for a number of reasons
The cost of what I do is immense and should be unnecessary.
The people and processes that make software archeology necessary are part of the problem that manifest in the problems we see in StackOverflow/StackExchange.
The perception of the task of Documentation is seen as
On the other hand good quality documentation is valued as an accelerant. Hypocrisy, thy name is IT.
Without carefully constructed and curated, quality documentation the chances are that any moderately complex system will be threatened by a rewrite. If an IT system was a house a request to repaint a door would yield a recommendation to tear down the existing house, redig the foundations and rebuild from scratch.
August 9, 2023 at 12:06 pm
My 'publication date' is 1943/03/10. Have I expired? Some days I feel like it.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
August 9, 2023 at 2:21 pm
Not dating content is one of my biggest complaints about blog posts. It seems to me like this is improving, as 10 years ago I'd search on a topic, then get these results with no date at all. I couldn't be sure if it was written last week or 15 years ago.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
August 9, 2023 at 5:54 pm
I hate people that don't have a dateline on posts. I look for this all the time. I even check mine sometimes to see if the post might still be relevant or I need to look for something else. I wish Google would slow de-rank older content as it ages.
August 9, 2023 at 8:25 pm
Lack of dateline and dateline only at the bottom of the post are both pet peeves of mine. Back around 2015 when the company I work for was moving everything to the cloud we spent huge amounts of time researching options for moving forward. A very high percentage of that time was wasted as the Azure and AWS environment were changing so fast that any technical article more than six months old was likely completely out of date.
August 10, 2023 at 2:15 pm
I've been in pain recently because of a niche topic and old information. I'm trying to migrate data into PostgreSQL through Azure IoT Hub. Troubleshooting stinks. Error messages are crap. And all the examples and SO answers are old, so I'm pretty sure I'm hitting problems due to changes in Azure. It's a royal pain, so, yeah, I hear you.
However, it's not a new problem. Page Life Expectancy anyone? We've been saying that the guidance around PLE>300 is bad since about 2002 or thereabouts. Yet... PLE was added to Redgate SQL Monitor, despite my strenuous objections, because clients think it's important because information, that was wrong, was posted 25 years ago, and will not go away.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
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SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
August 10, 2023 at 2:42 pm
I do appreciate that both SO and SSC date their content. When I am looking for information on a topic I always look at the time frame the answers or posts were made. If it is more than a year old I am far more skeptical that the content is still correct.
It is an interesting topic for sure. The idea of de-ranking content as it ages has a ton of merit for technical information. But for more typical content that doesn't change overtime that could be problematic. The trick then would be deciding what topics or information age well and which ones are fine.
Age aside, the answers on SO are far lower quality than SSC used to be. This is largely due to discouragement of a discussion. So many times on SSC an "answer" would be posted but through discussion it was revealed that there are better options. When you try the same thing on SO you get flamed for commenting on somebody else's answer and told to post your own. While this seems logical, it often is less than ideal because the OP "found their answer" and marked one as the correct answer. Nobody comes back later to mark the best answer as the correct one.
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August 10, 2023 at 3:02 pm
I had to laugh, in painful sympathy, at that last sentence, Grant.
Ha!
And we can keep going. Don't let Jeff get started on fragmentation. Don't let me get started on Extended Events.
But seriously, it does seem like the more we information we have, the less useful it becomes. Or maybe I'm just an old fart.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
August 13, 2023 at 6:00 am
Rod at work wrote:I had to laugh, in painful sympathy, at that last sentence, Grant.
Ha!
And we can keep going. Don't let Jeff get started on fragmentation. Don't let me get started on Extended Events.
But seriously, it does seem like the more we information we have, the less useful it becomes. Or maybe I'm just an old fart.
Oooooo... careful now... you said "fragmentation". 😀
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
August 14, 2023 at 4:56 pm
Funny that this popped up. As I was working through an issue with a colleague, he did a google search. The first result was SO. And, the answer provided was not right. It was about calculating table sizes from the number of pages.
Michael L John
If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
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