A Programmers Q&A

Stack Overflow is a relatively new website that has come on to the scene of Q& A websites hoping to provide a place for programmers to ask and answer questions about programming. At its heart it is a question and answer website were users can ask questions about a specific topic that they need help with and the community will come and answer their question. The founder of the site calls it the “anti-experts-exchange”. I’m sure most of you are familiar with Experts Exchange from Googling programming related issues. They are a rather large Q&A site with lots of good programming topics. Unfortunately, they have implemented search engine cloaking techniques on their site that presents the data to search engines differently than the data is presented to the anonymous users of the site. The cloaking lets the search engines effectively index the sites content while making the majority of the users who have found the content through a search engine pay Experts Exchange in order to view answers to the questions.

Stack Overflow is different from most other Q&A websites. They started off with then intention to merge the global editability of a wiki and Digg /Reddit style ranking into the Q&A website format. Users of the site gain reputation points by commenting or having their questions or answers voted up. As their reputation grows, so does their moderation ability on the website. In a sense, the site learns to trust certain users granting them the power to modify other peoples content.

Users are also rewarded with badges that they earn when meeting certain criteria. For instance, users who have a question or an answer voted up by more than 100 people will earn the Great Question or Great Answer badge. The badges are used as a motivation device so that the users of the site will be rewarded for contributing.

This is certainly an interesting site to read through and also to understand how it works. The merging of wiki aspects into a Q&A website definitely gives the power of the content to the users.