A dream
Last updated: 14 July 2021
Have you tried to contribute with forums or any platform about Q&A?
New questions are appearing continuously.
They are endless lists of questions and questions.
After taking a look, some kinds of questions can be found:
- Looking for an opinion.
- Looking for a tool to do something.
- Trying to understand a concept.
- Knowing the reason for a message error and how to solve it.
- Knowing how to do something with a programming language or a tool.
I understand the first two types of questions. However, what about the rest of the types?
What are the reasons for those questions?
They could be a signal about poor content in the official documentation.
Or maybe the official documentation is not properly organized or indexed and it’s not easy to find something.
Or perhaps the reason is our contemporary world where we’re getting used to achieving things immediately with “one-click” and there is no patience to read the documentation.
Anyway, what if …
- The platform allows a way to provide one or more links when the answer can be found in the related documentation.
- Otherwise, the platform would greatly recognize when someone provides the answer and at the same time makes a contribution to improve the related documentation.
Do you imagine how the technical documentation would improve?
Other things could happen afterwards: the use of technical documentation would increase and the number of questions would decrease.
If I think about the programming languages and tools that I learnt, I found it difficult to find “a single source of truth”. One of my dreams in this profession would be having better documentation (content, organization and indexation) and fewer questions on other platforms.
Corollary
It’s about “listening to the signals”, using the questions as feedback to identify improvement points.
For instance, I usually talk about “preparing a demo” or “preparing docs” moments. When doing it, I realize things that could be enhanced to make it easier to explain.
Credit
Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay