Can Stack Overflow benefit from some pearls of perlmonk wisdom? [closed]

Question

Overview

Stack Overflow has just recently come onto my radar screen, but I've been an avid user of perlmonks for a while, as well as a reader and "fan" of many people behind this very site. Because of that, I think this site looks very promising and I would like to know what others think about these enhancement ideas.

Note: these have nothing to do with perl programming, I just use that as a comparison for a similar site that seems to share a similar niche.

Sub-portals

First, let me start with the biggie. What do people think about segmenting SO into sub-portals based on language? Sure, tagging and searching work well, and hierarchy is so 1998, but I can't count the number of times I've seen people ask if there was a "rubymonks" or a "pythonmonks" or a "foobar_language_monks" site out there.

Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate bifurcating SO content. I just think a couple of tweaks along with some alias sites (ruby.SO.com // python.SO.com // foobarlang.SO.com) would work wonders at garnering more language-specific awareness (and thus experience) under the entire SO umbrella. Also, I think it would help avoid the (unintended?) possible prejudice among potential users that this site is mostly for DotNet people.

Direct Perlmonk Ripoffs

Here are some personal-favorite perlmonks features that (apparently) are not here at SO, but should be (apologies if they already are, please feel free to correct me).

• Chatterbox: (real time web-based convo, see perlmonks.org for example)
• Posting types other than Question: After doing a little homework here, I see not every original post on SO is really intended as a question. Perlmonks has something called "meditations" and "Cool Uses". It seems like SO could benefit from this as well, using a scheme a bit bigger than "folksonomy-tagging-only".
• Best and Worst posts: links (see not only what's hot, but what's been downvoted a lot)
• Categorized Posts: Folksonomy-style tags are good, but sometimes a "top-down" organizational style has benefits too, if used judiciously. (see e.g., Perlmonks Categorized Q and A)

That's enough for now. Great site, thanks for any constructive criticism and feedback.

UPDATE: Sat 2017-04-08 These seeds that were planted long ago developed nicely!

• Sub-portals: now a well-established element of the StackExchange network
• Chatterbox: now a well-established feature
• Best and worst: now a feature available through http://data.stackexchange.com
• Categorized Posts: https://stackoverflow.com/documentation currently in beta

Answer 1

One argument against heirarchy or segregation is that sometimes I answer questions about languages I don't know, just because what is being asked is more general than the asker really knows. I won't be able to do them if I don't see those posts.

Answer 2

As for sub-portals, What you are suggesting:

perl.stackoverflow.com

and what exists now is:

stackoverflow.com/tagged/perl

I don't think the current situation is all that onerous.

Answer 3

I could see the benefit of a chatterbox function, but I don't know whether the server could handle the load currently. What you call "meditations" already exists here, where people ask for best practices and similar. There's already a best post section, not sure what the point of a worst post section would be, as since the post is bad, why would you want to read it? Categorized posts essentially exist on SO already, only they were created by the users. Having some pre-created for the users doesn't make much sense anymore, now that the site already includes the basics.

Answer 4

On bifurcation and subportals: an excellent article was highlighted on a previous thread here (credit to @Ryan, not me...)

Answer 5

Here are my 5 cents.

I don't like the portal idea, when I look at the tags of questions I have answered I see LOTS of tags that don't match what I thought I would answer on. If there was a VB.Net portal, I would hang there all days long and miss good information and a lots of answers would never be made by me on other topics I have knowledge in (there are similarities between the languages and controls and so on).

I don't like Chatterbox for one reason. A lots of questions will be asked and answered in the chat and therefor never will be recorded for other to learn from.

I like the idea of meditations/cool uses. A lot.

I don't like "Best and Worst posts". I don't know why, but I think its to much judging as it is already. ;)

Categorized Posts is just a way to serve the information in another way. That cannot be a bad thing. ;) As long as its an enhancement and not an replacement I'm for it.

Answer 6

I idle here a lot. SO really IS a .NET site in general, with side knowledge being brought in by the .NET participants that helps the other areas.

Is this a problem? In my view, yes. There is a whole world of programming out there beyond .NET/LINQ/C#/MS-SQL & web development, and there are a lot of questions about it!

Answer 7

Here are some personal-favorite perlmonks features that (apparently) are not here at SO, but should be (apologies if they already are, please feel free to correct me).

Chatterbox: (real time web-based convo, see perlmonks.org for example)

Interesting, as this is now actively being worked on.