> On Stack Overflow, the most common disconnect is between these two goals:
I wonder if you could serve both these goals. What if the basic Q&A machinery was used to explicitly help solve asker's problems, but there was a mechanism to elevate a question and its answers into the site's library of long-term knowledge? The site could then do standard SEO-fu to only include the latter questions in search results, emphasise them more in search, etc. The mechanism could be something like the current close vote mechanism - if four users with sufficient rep vote to elevate, it gets elevated, plus mods can do it directly, de-elevate, etc.
You could end up with lots of "low-quality" questions and answers whose turnover is still helping people in concrete ways, but also build up a repository of knowledge.
I wonder if you could serve both these goals. What if the basic Q&A machinery was used to explicitly help solve asker's problems, but there was a mechanism to elevate a question and its answers into the site's library of long-term knowledge? The site could then do standard SEO-fu to only include the latter questions in search results, emphasise them more in search, etc. The mechanism could be something like the current close vote mechanism - if four users with sufficient rep vote to elevate, it gets elevated, plus mods can do it directly, de-elevate, etc.
You could end up with lots of "low-quality" questions and answers whose turnover is still helping people in concrete ways, but also build up a repository of knowledge.