Trial of openEHR's own 'stackExchange' on the openEHR wiki

one of the features we don’t use on the wiki is ‘Questions’, which you can see here.

This supposedly is the same kind of function as StackExchange, which we didn’t get off the ground. So maybe we should try locally.

My proposal would be for some community members to raise a question or two at the above link and see what the experience is like for creating answers, upvoting etc. We might find it is good enough.

For reference, here is the openEHR StackExchange page, which might be useful for remembering questions people had.

  • thomas

I just posted a real question, hope someone can give me a good answer that solves my problem! J

Btw, does anyone else experience a strange behaviour of the wiki editor, where it automatically capitalises some words as you type?

Mvh.

Silje

There seems to be an authorization-problem, the site says

In any case I still believe that we should create the corresponding [openEHR] tag in stackoverflow

I agree, that is the best thing. StackOverflow guards the questions and answers very well, as I experience, so there is not much risk for impolite/stupid answers which can scare people away from OpenEHR. By the way, hl7 and hl7-fhir have StackOverflow tags.

The tag would be good to have, but I think Tom’s suggestion addresses a bigger issue we were likely to have if StackOverflow site went forward.

Many of the questions asked about openEHR are not in the form of “how do I do this?” They’d be classified as argumentative, subjective etc by the brutal editorial process of SO and closed down. I admit that this policy keeps SO very useful, but it sometimes leads to very helpful topics getting closed.

Something that supports the QA format but less strict may work better for the openEHR community.

I made a response but I suspect noone will see it because noone is ‘watching’. Could a few people try watching, upvoting (assuming you don’t hate the response :), to see what happens in terms of notifications - I don’t really know how this Questions feature works on Confluence, so I think we just need to test it a bit.

  • thomas

Bert,

were you logged in?

I think this is a good point - my current assumption is that we will have a certain flavour of question on SO, often with URLs pointing to the openEHR Questions facility, assuming we get the latter working. But I think that we can potentially make the content on the Questions part of the openEHR wiki a nice, fairly clean set of questions, unpolluted by everything else in health informatics/ programming, so potentially a decent resource for newcomers.

I may be wrong, but let’s do both and try to get some content happening, and we’ll soon see what works I think.

  • thomas

I think for this to be useful, the site have to be readable without logging in…

Regards,
Silje

Yes, I just tested it again, I have on the upper right my "logged In"-icon with my name under it and upper left the menu and I can go to my Dashboard, but I get the "not permitted" when I go to the wiki.

Bert

That is also true, Google must be able to reach it, and not anyone wants to be known when searching information.

Ok, logged in, upvoted the question, then watched the question. The answer was accepted and I received an e-mail telling me that. So it all seems to be working.

The point about making this publicly visible is a good one, but is it possible?

Finally, even though I’m in favour of a less strict format for Q&A, I think there should still be something that separates this site from the e-mail groups. Not to trigger another trip to a rabbit hole, but some mail lists are simply moving to SO completely due to overlap. Better make sure that we don’t end up with the ‘old wiki’ problem (in which there is always an old wiki somewhere and some critical information is written in it, except no one knows where the old wiki is now…)

I changed the wiki so that Questions is now visible read-only to non-logged in users. I have checked that this works on a test machine.

  • thomas

Works OK now. What makes me doubt is a very obvious competition-figure-system near the questions. It gives too much away about the people being active on the forum. I think it can (I don’t mean to say it that rough) ~poison~ discussions I have, however, no problem when it is a (few) mouseclick(s) away. Can that be changed? If not, I will try to live with it. Bert

do you mean the ‘top expert’ kind of stuff? It seems pre-computed as far as I can tell. Let’s play with it for a few months and see how well it works. We can always try somtehing else later if it doesn’t do the job.

Looks good, same as stackoverflow, about.

good the options to watch and share questions

Yes, I consider it a bit harmful. It is public information, and people get in competition. Employers and/or project builders are tempted to use this information to find out on base of the figures about expertise or quality.

I think it is better not to be in that kind of list (or with zero), then being in it with low figures. And since I don't want to spent time on keeping up good figures, it is better not to be on the list.

Then I can excuse myself by saying that I work too hard for keeping up good appearances.

(which is a very British and very good tv-show)

This seems very appropriate for the occasion:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPd7__jWYsw