Stack Overflow replaces official documentation on all issues.
Software companies, like Microsoft or Google, publish millions of developer articles describing software interfaces, services, and platforms. They put a lot of effort into creating documentation.
At the same time, the developers themselves read less and less official documentation, and increasingly receive information on specialized sites, a study by Ninlabs Research showed. It turned out that about 50% of the time developers spend on specialized sites for programmers, including Stack Overflow , and not at all on portals with official documentation.
Some companies have already noticed this crowdsourcing trend. For example, developer support for the YouTube API API documentation has recently completely migrated from Google Groups to Stack Overflow, especially since by the time of the migration, thousands of questions on the YouTube API had accumulated on the question-answer site for programmers.
A similar situation on many other topics. If you search for a narrowly specialized question in a search engine, then the first line of the search will be Stack Overflow rather than MSDN. The study showed that after real searches, the Stack Overflow site is visited 2-10 times more often than the site with official documentation.
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Developers actually create alternative crowdsourcing documentation for various APIs, posting blog posts and answering questions. The Ninlabs Research study showed that Android developers, without any outside coordination, described 88% of the API classes in detail in discussions at Stack Overflow on their own. If in official documentation code samples are present only for 26% of API classes, then on Stack Overflow they are in 56% of accepted answers. In general, all official Android documentation contains 1711 code fragments, and on Stack Overflow there are 156,747.
As part of the study, Ninlabs Research analyzed the history of surfing 17 Android application developers. For an average of 11 weeks, they visited the Stack Overflow site 9234 times, and only 2547 times visited the developer.android.com site with official documentation.
At the same time, the developers themselves read less and less official documentation, and increasingly receive information on specialized sites, a study by Ninlabs Research showed. It turned out that about 50% of the time developers spend on specialized sites for programmers, including Stack Overflow , and not at all on portals with official documentation.
Some companies have already noticed this crowdsourcing trend. For example, developer support for the YouTube API API documentation has recently completely migrated from Google Groups to Stack Overflow, especially since by the time of the migration, thousands of questions on the YouTube API had accumulated on the question-answer site for programmers.
A similar situation on many other topics. If you search for a narrowly specialized question in a search engine, then the first line of the search will be Stack Overflow rather than MSDN. The study showed that after real searches, the Stack Overflow site is visited 2-10 times more often than the site with official documentation.
')
Developers actually create alternative crowdsourcing documentation for various APIs, posting blog posts and answering questions. The Ninlabs Research study showed that Android developers, without any outside coordination, described 88% of the API classes in detail in discussions at Stack Overflow on their own. If in official documentation code samples are present only for 26% of API classes, then on Stack Overflow they are in 56% of accepted answers. In general, all official Android documentation contains 1711 code fragments, and on Stack Overflow there are 156,747.
As part of the study, Ninlabs Research analyzed the history of surfing 17 Android application developers. For an average of 11 weeks, they visited the Stack Overflow site 9234 times, and only 2547 times visited the developer.android.com site with official documentation.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/182034/
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