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I only recently learned about the Documentation feature on Stack Overflow, and my initial impression is that this could be useful on some of the other more technical sites I'm involved with, such as EE and Retrocomputing. While I understand that this won't happen any time soon, I have some more general questions about the feature, and I'm having trouble tracking down information.

The topic came up recently on meta.EE, and the concerns we have relate to the potential for Documentation to "compete" with the regular tag system and also with the Community Wiki system, fragmenting rather than consolidating information.

Is there any information discussing the general features of the Documentation system and how it compares/contrasts with those other systems? I tried looking on the Stack Overflow blog, but the new implementation doesn't seem to have any sort of search function, and I couldn't find anything by scanning manually through the posts.

Searching here on Meta is similarly fruitless, because "documentation" has been used for so many things other than "Documentation". I see that the summary for the tag says that questions about this feature should be directed to meta.SO, so if it makes sense to migrate this question there, please go ahead.

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    Have an upvote just for the title. It could be a lead statement on so many projects I've landed on over the years:) – Martin James Feb 15 '17 at 15:05
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    I know you're asking in the context of this being used on other sites but since you're actually just asking what it currently is this should probably be on MSO (there's also a lot of posts about it there already). – Cai Feb 15 '17 at 15:06
  • @Cai: Yes. I've been browsing there already, but I'm not finding the kind of "design philosophy" information that I'm looking for -- just a lot of complaints about how bad it is. – Dave Tweed Feb 15 '17 at 15:17
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    Although I agree Cai, we can't keep everyone sending to MSO who wants to have information on the application network-wide. – Patrick Hofman Feb 15 '17 at 15:23
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    Initial post with the reason why Documentation was introduced. – Patrick Hofman Feb 15 '17 at 15:25
  • @PatrickHofman I do agree, and I've held off from close-voting. Documentation is SO specific though so the chances of getting the info and input from people who actually use it are probably a lot better on MSO – Cai Feb 15 '17 at 15:27
  • @PatrickHofman: Thanks for that link. It's interesting that huge majority of the text on that page is in fact related to the fragmentation issue, which never seems to get resolved one way or the other. However, most of that discussion is about duplicating effort with external sites, and I was actually mainly concerned about the issue just within SE itself. – Dave Tweed Feb 15 '17 at 15:49
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    How Stack Overflow sees and uses documentation might not strongly align with possible ways folks see other sites using it - I think this firmly belongs here. – Tim Post Feb 15 '17 at 16:45
  • @TimPost: Yes, as I read more about it, it seems that the SO concept is rather narrowly focused on documenting the APIs of software applications and libraries in order to facilitate their reuse. In other communities, it would be used in a much broader sense. – Dave Tweed Feb 15 '17 at 16:58

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