I chose the title slightly to poke at Stack Overflow (SO), but the same take expressed in this tweet could be said about SQL Server Central. It’s not quite the same as anyone can answer questions on SQL Server Central.
The tweet is a (long) hot take from Jerry Nixon, a C# developer and MS evangelist in Denver. Essentially he says that a lot of the SO answers are wrong, especially as the software and languages change. Old answers are upvoted, and remain at the top of the list, even as newer answers might be better. People don’t like the behavior on SO of moderators and people who post, which is something we’ve tried to avoid or limit here at SQL Server Central. We want there to be professional discussions. SO also doesn’t allow much discussion or nuance in the questions or answers.
This isn’t just a SO problem or am SSC one. It’s a problem when we have lots of documentation, blogs, etc. on the Internet that search engines find and surface when it’s popular. Across time, these popular outdated posts remain, just like older documentation that doesn’t apply to a current version and this can be frustrating. I am even starting to get annoyed by the MS Learn docs for SQL Server as some functionality change across versions. It isn’t easy to determine what applies to which version, especially when subtle changes are made in how things work. If something is new, usually that’s clear, but when things change, it isn’t. The examples aren’t well maintained, or there are too many of them to really understand how and why a change in versions can affect your code.
I do wonder if we ought to somehow limit content that we see by default to more recent content. Or maybe Google/Bing/et al ought to let us set that as a preference. In general, I want more recent content, but at the same time, I don’t want to say “give me blogs about something from the last month only.” It’s possible I use something that’s rare and the most recent blog is 7 months old.
More, I wish we had better ways to tag content online as relevant for certain things or not. I can’t think about the entire world and all the different types of content, but I can think about technology and software. I’d like to know if someone write a highly popular and useful post on PowerShell 5 that was written and tested on that version. I can understand that it’s not necessarily tested on PoSh 7, though it could work. It could even be the best solution. The same thing applies to Python 3.8 or T-SQL for SQL 2016 or any other software.
The challenge of keeping things up to date is a big one, especially as more companies move to release software more often. I’m always pointing out issues in the RG docs. Since we release every week or two, each product team has a busy job in ensuring documents are up to date, which is easy for the reference pages. This is a bit harder when there are articles were we explain how to use a feature or we have a walkthrough of the software. I don’t know if AI will help here, but I do think this is a place where AI might be able to help vendors at least keep up with changes. When code changes, update docs, all the docs including examples.
I do also think dating content is important. Microsoft tried to stop doing this with some things and many people complained. Content needs a date. It might still be valid or useful, but without a date, we have no idea of the context in which it was produced. That might help us decide if it’s still relevant, useful, or if we need to continue searching further.
Steve Jones
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