Could WSOIN be resurrected with a new wording strategy?

Question

The famous What Stack Overflow is not question (10k+ only) was deleted a couple of weeks ago. The reason was the (real or perceived) rudeness that accompanied the question's use. The question was split into sub-headings (answers) that you could link to when you saw a user do something that went against Stack Overflow's rules. The headings would read, for example,

Stack Overflow is not your research assistant

and link to the right "chapter" in the question. It was deemed that headings like this, posted on their own with no explanation, are not the nicest way to greet a new user who isn't familiar with the site's rules, and I tend to agree.

However, the question itself, and its contents, was tremendously useful in guiding new users on what they did "wrong", and how to fix it. To me, this question and linking to it had the signs of the "just-in-time documentation" that Jeff is so often on about, in that people were directed specifically to what they need to know. You have to admit that the rationale for many of Stack Overflow's intricacies live on Meta and are very hard to find for an outsider.

Also, the question's contents were polished to be very, very polite. It was the headings that were the problem. (Of course, you can argue that the real problem lay with commenters using the content in a rude way, but that argument has been had and it's a different discussion.)

Would it make sense resurrecting WSOIN using headings that, even when posted on their own, sound more neutral? For the question's heading, I was thinking about something like

How to ask a question on Stack Overflow and not die trying

and for the format of the sub-headings, instead of "Stack Overflow is not....", this:

Should I do (thing that you should never, ever do on Stack Overflow)?

With some exceptions where the format doesn't really sound good.

So looking at the real WSOIN, some examples:

Stack Overflow is not your research assistant

becomes What research should I do before asking a question on Stack Overflow?

or maybe Should I ask a question on Stack Overflow without doing prior research?

-

Stack Overflow doesn't provide product or service recommendations

becomes Should I ask for product or service recommendations on Stack Overflow?

...

Stack Overflow won't do your homework for you

becomes Should I copy & paste homework questions?

or What should I beware of when asking homework questions?

...

Stack Overflow is not tied to your deadline

becomes Should I mention deadlines and mark questions "Urgent!!!"?

and so on and so on. You get the drift.

However, before people start working on this, there needs to be a statement from the management whether something like this has a chance. Nobody expects a guarantee that it will live; I understand no one can give that. But does it have a chance to survive if results are good?

I don't think anybody is going to go through the crapload of work that Robert and others went through for WSOIN when the only result is that it gets deleted again.

Answer 1

WSOiN was an attempt to codify all of the ways new people could trip over their feet when interacting with SO for the first time. It's primary purpose was to be an educational tool, not a Wiffle bat.

If we're going to resurrect any of this material, I think we first need to consider:

1. The FAQ and "How to Ask" are better than they used to be. Some improvements were made at about the same time as WSOiN that codify some of the subjects identified in WSOiN.

2. The FAQ and the FAQ tag on Meta should be the first ports of call. If these resources are inadequate, how can we shore them up so that they are better? What subjects are already covered by existing material, and what needs to be added?

3. How do we keep it from being a laundry list of don'ts?

Despite the controversial nature of Accept Rate, nobody argues that How does accept rate work? and How does accepting an answer work? are rude, do not serve their purpose, and should be removed. So there are ways to approach this without offending people.

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I agree with Shog9. Let's figure out what's essential in WSOiN that is missing from the FAQ tag on Meta, and write [faq-proposed] questions for each topic. Let's use the process that we already created for this purpose.

Answer 2

The "titles as comments" thing was arguably not even a problem with WSOiN itself - if folks had written detailed, specific comments^* addressing problems with a question and included Meta links at the end ("for more on this, see...") WSOiN could possibly have been fixed in place.

Before we get all nostalgic though, WSOiN did have problems beyond simply making snarky, link-only comments all too tempting. Answers by Jon and Pops in How can the "What Stack Overflow Is Not" post be improved? say it best:

• Instead of being confronted with "bad behavior #21", you could point them to the specific misconception they have about the site.

  Dumping everything into a single question is very problematic. Way back when, that's how the SO FAQ was constructed - it became unmanageable almost immediately, and was split up into its current form (one "directory" question + dozens of individual question and answers). Repeating this mistake a third time would be pretty stupid.

• I've seen people post one-liner links to WSOiN entries and then leave without making any attempt to fix obvious spelling errors or other issues with posts. I suspect that the same is true of voting and flagging.

  One of the biggest selling points of WSOiN was that it made finding pre-baked responses to common problems easy. Of course, we already have "easy" - vote and flag. The saddest uses of WSOiN links I came across were from folks who linked to it, but when questioned by others revealed they had little or no understanding of how the topic they'd just linked actually related to the question they'd commented on. If you've ever been accosted by an evangelist armed with choice quotes but ignorant of their context, you know the sort of insanity that results from this. Ironically, this seems to be largely due to the lack of detail provided by WSOiN - the answers were concise, but the problem statements were kept to a single line of text, and focused more on being pithy and memorable than on being descriptive. If you were to convert each WSOiN topic to a MSO question without modification, "not a real question" would have to be revived for them...

My best advice then is to focus on writing discrete questions and answers that address specific scenarios, describing those scenarios in the question and addressing them in the answer. Focusing on existing faq entries is probably a good start - many of these are real questions that people asked. Also, resist the impulse to lump a dozen different problems into one broad category: book requests are not the same as camera shopping questions.

And above all, try to assume the best - the folks who don't want to do right won't bother reading these at all. If these end up being yet another thinly-veiled outlet for frustration and anger, they'll suffer the same fate as their predecessor.

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^*To be fair, some people did do this. Not very many, and not very often, but I did encounter a few.