[yt-dev] Asking questions on StackOverflow

j s oishi jsoishi at gmail.com
Sun Nov 17 06:17:28 PST 2013


Hi,

Honestly, I think the most important thing is: it's a place a LOT of people
go to look for answers regarding computing questions. Virtually every error
message I google regarding any aspect of programming (especially matplotlib
and latex) has an answer on SO. The reason to engage on SO is that that is
where users might be. We don't get to dictate where people look for help; I
don't think we should consolidate our answers in one place because it's
convenient for us.

As far as consolidation,I like to think of it this way: there's nothing
stopping any person from starting up a "yt tips and tricks" page on their
own site. I think we'd all be overjoyed if something like that happened.
This is the same thing. Searching the web is functionally the same as
searching the mailing list, but much more dynamic (as Nick points out, I
often find the mailing list utterly useless because yt moves at an
extremely rapid place) and much wider in scope (as yt gets bigger, we the
developers will not always have the best answer). As for Matt's concern
that the mailing list makes quantification easy: I don't think SO will hurt
that. I just wrote in a grant proposal the number of views the yt workshop
videos had on youtube. SO also reports basic statistics (241,916 questions
tagged about c++, it says right now). We are always adding new technologies
to the support framework for yt; I think this is simply another one.

I agree with Nathan: this is something we should experiment with.

j


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 9:03 AM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Elizabeth,
>
> On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 6:48 AM, Elizabeth Tasker
> <tasker at astro1.sci.hokudai.ac.jp> wrote:
> > Hi Nathan and Matt,
> >
> > I've never used SO (or indeed heard of it until I saw the twitter thread)
> > and I'm very open to being convinced of its merits.
> >
> > However, I'm also a bit concerned about fragmenting our Q&A.
>
> (Me too!)
>
> > For example, if
> > I have a problem with yt, one of the first things I do is hit the "search
> > the mailing list" box on the doc page.
> >
> > e.g.
> >
> http://www.google.com/cse?cx=010428198273461986377%3Axyfd9ztykqm&ie=UTF-8&q=elizabeth+has+a+problem&sa=Search&siteurl=yt-project.org%2Fdocs%2F2.5%2F&ref=yt-project.org%2Fcommunity.html&ss=5151j1127787j37#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=elizabeth%20has%20a%20problem&gsc.page=1
> >
> > Now that is pretty simple. What is SO offering that beats that?
> >
>
> The answers can be updated over time -- which can't happen with a
> linear system like the mailing list.  So you might turn up an old
> answer on the mailing list, but on SO it would then be updated over
> time to match the current SOP.
>
> -Matt
>
> > Elizabeth
> >
> >
> > On Nov 17, 2013, at 10:40 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Nathan,
> >
> > On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 12:01 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com
> >
> > wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I recently subscribed to the [yt] tag on StackExchange.  Now, whenever a
> > question is asked using this tag on any StackExchange site, I will get an
> > e-mail about it, just like if a question is asked on the users or dev
> list.
> > Currently (as far as I can tell) zero questions have been asked using
> this
> > tag...
> >
> > If there are a few others who are interested in subscribing to the tag, I
> > think it might be worthwhile to add StackOverflow to the website and docs
> > where we describe how to get help and also announce on the user’s list
> that
> > StackOverflow is an alternate place to ask questions.
> >
> > While this might split the community somewhat - not everyone will be
> > subscribed to StackOverflow and thus might miss useful info - I think
> moving
> > some helpful suggestions to StackOverflow will massively improve
> > googleability of common yt issues, allowing us to avoid answering the
> same
> > questions over and over again.
> >
> > It might also be worthwhile to ask and answer some common yt questions.
>  Off
> > the top of my head, I think we could at least answer how to load various
> > types of datasets into yt.
> >
> >
> > In principle, I'm okay with this.  But I have a few concerns --
> >
> > 1) I don't think the tag "yt" can be created unless someone with high
> > reputation does so.  (
> > http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-tags )
> > 2) We have well-defined usage metrics that we can quantify based on
> > mailing list activity, so this may fragment that.
> > 3) Many of the existing contributors and users don't want another inbox.
> >
> > *However*.  SO is really quite good for evolving questions and for an
> > updateable reference.  I do really like that aspect.  But I think we
> > may find ourselves getting a bit fragmented -- in fact, what I see as
> > being a possible outcome is that if yt does end up growing into an
> > interdisciplinary space, we'd see people from non-Astro disciplines
> > using it, but retaining our original core audience here.  All your
> > points really are good ones.
> >
> > I don't know.  Could be awesome.  And, I'd like to see us embrace more
> > modern and useful methods of communication and outreach.  So ... I
> > guess the experiment could be a good one!
> >
> > -Matt
> >
> >
> > -Nathan
> >
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> >
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