Developers May Be Getting 50% of Their Documentation From Stack Overflow

New submitter gameweld writes "Software companies, such as Microsoft, create documentation for millions of topics concerning its APIs, services, and software platforms. Creating this documentation comes at a considerable cost and effort. And after all this effort, much documentation is rarely consulted (citation) and lacking enough examples (citation). A new study suggests that developers are increasingly consulting Stack Overflow and crowd-sourced sites over official documentation, using it as much as 50% of time. How should official documentation be better redesigned? What are the implications of software created from unruly mashups?"

Comments

What does StackOverflow run on?

[mystikkman]

Interesting Stackoverflow runs on the .NET platform and is very fast despite the extreme load.

So much for Slashdot's wisdom that .NET sucks. Meanwhile Reddit on PHP or Python is superslow and is overloaded.