Comment by pkteison | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkteison | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the stack overflow model as being a great fit for what facebook api developers need. The main problem I saw with facebook api was that the right way to do things kept changing, and the docs and forum didn't keep up well. You basically needed to begin facebook API work by reading the entire blog in chronological order and then keep on scanning the dev blog daily, which may work ok if you're a fulltime facebook API developer but it is not a good fit for contract or part-time or hobby development.

I think changing APIs is begging for a wiki much more than a Q&A site. Facebook used to have a wiki for their api, but they went and deleted it, which I considered basically unforgiveable and proceeded to do my best to avoid having to touch the API after that.

In short, bringing back http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ and focusing on keeping it current would be a much better start than a Q&A site, even a really good Q&A site. You'd still have the need-to-keep-with-changes problem, but at least you'd have somewhere to start from, and wouldn't keep getting referred to out of date information when googling answers.

Yes I know Stack Overflow has community editable wiki question styles, but then you just compound the problem and now need to update 100 different 'how do I [x]' questions every time the API changes.

Many developers I know, myself included, avoid facebook integration like the plague for just this reason. Other services manage to version their APIs and depreciate them gracefully. Facebook apparently doesn't understand how to do this, or simply doesn't care.

> Facebook apparently doesn't understand how to do this, or simply doesn't care.

They didn't care. They didn't have to. Now they do, because they have to. (Hello, Google+)

I disagree - I find the stack overflow model much better than a wiki. In practice the search on SO is much better than a wiki because of how the questions are phrased. Using your how do I (x) example that is how the SO title would be phrased and that is how a developer searches for a solution.

Facebooks API docs are improving too - so this combination of quality docs and SO could be great.

The SO model works better is the API never changes - but since it does, a Wiki would probably be best.

I've both responded to SO questions with updates, as well as had one of my top answers be replaced by a newer, better solution. In browsing questions, I've also seen a number of updates to existing answers.

I guess the point is, if you've spent a lot of time figuring something out, and you've proved that a number of solutions on the internet are now wrong, you're tempted to make it easier for the next guy. I think this is true regardless of the medium, but SO seems to have done well at creating an environment where it happens.

That's supposed to be what the Change Log is for: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/changelog/ But yeah, they need to work on the relevancy of that content in regards to the constant changes going on.

Maybe developers should just start an unofficial Facebook Wiki.

Most people would rather ask and answer questions than maintain or update a wiki. That's what they have been doing, over at stackoverflow.

Since people are already discussing Facebook API over at Stackoverflow, they might as well make it official.

I disagree.

Why try and build your own community when there's already an existing one with a lot of useful questions, engaged moderators and smart people answering?

Especially when you've failed to support your existing community at all.

You do realize we already have 13,700 facebook related questions? http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions

Yeah but that takes work, why would they want to do that when they could just let the community-based Q&A site take care of it?

They are still keeping the API docs though, and hopefully they will be able to re-allocate resources from managing the forum to keeping the API docs up to date.

Maybe I've missed it but nobody has mentioned that SO allows posts to be in a community wiki format. Doesn't this reach a nice balance between the two?

Anybody can suggest edits ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/suggested-edits-and-ed... ) without even registering.

Community wiki posts can be outright edited by low rep users, and higher rep users can edit any post.

The idea that a wiki is better for rapidly changing content is... odd, to me; it seems it'd be a wash at best. Then again I'm an SE Inc. employee, so perhaps I just don't see the difference.

Agreed that the wiki would have been useful. I think the Stack overflow site would just be a replacement for their forums

I agree. Their platform changes more often than their underwear. A wiki would be very helpful. I hate to search for a problem and find 10 different solutions all of which have been deprecated. Curiously, even in the old documentation wiki developers were not allowed to edit pages. I think there must be some FB development wikis out there, lost in obscurity.

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