To those unhappy with how the version move went on the wiki, there is reasoning for it. Search "wiki df2010" in DF General Discussion and you ought to get a few threads about it. You might not agree with it, but it's been laid out in full by the wiki admins several times now, so there's no need to rehash that here.
The tone that RCIX has been getting from the first page of responses is unreasonably challenging. There's a huge adhering to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" here, even though this is a scenario where it could potentially be better and won't harm these forums if you try to make it work and it doesn't.
It's not so much "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as "if there's not a need, don't fill it." Yes, it's being challenged, but not unreasonably so. For one thing, the OP (who is new to the community) is basically suggesting this because he couldn't find what he wanted on the wiki and somehow doesn't believe that the forums are an appropriate place to ask questions and get answers (wrong). What I am seeing is one guy who doesn't get it proposing we radically change the system from interesting discussions and prompt, factual answers to basically a glorified Yahoo Answers, and is using poor reasoning to back himself up. But if you'd like a more detailed discussion on why this would be a bad choice for the forums, here are my full thoughts on the matter:
- On the forums, you can ask questions. On stack exchange, you can ask questions. No difference.
- On the forums, you can discuss things. On stack exchange, you cannot - you are limited to posting an answer, and as they are sorted by votes rather than by date, having an actual discussion would be impossible anyways. Difference in favour of the forums.
- The forums already exist and are well-populated by intelligent and polite community members. Stack exchange does not. Regardless of what you may expect, the full forum community is never going to entirely move to stack exchange if implemented, so rather than keeping the status quo, a stack exchange would actually thin out the community more by splitting it up. Difference in favour of the forums - strongly in favour, in my opinion.
- On the forums, if someone is wrong, or partially right but missing some facts, you can just quote them and add to their explanation. As mentioned in brief above, with stack exchange it would be very difficult to do this because if you try and directly quote someone you would have to do it in a posted answer, and as answers would move up and down the page, there isn't really any way to make sure answers are appropriate. Difference in favour of the forums.
- On the forums, if someone gives a bad/generic answer (ie. based off long-past-stale jokes), they are ignored in favour of informative responses. This is because someone can chuckle a bit at a bad joke without being able to vote for it, or if they see poor information someone else will correct them and explain what they were missing. On stack exchange, these will be voted up by people who think they are funny, or in the case of rumours, voted up by people who agree with them. When RCIX says that moderators will be able to monitor things easily, I disagree for two reasons: One, it's quite likely that if a reputation system takes effect, the people who propagate rumours and make jokes will be voted up first and thus become the honourary mods. Two, even if the people who answer nicely with straight facts become such honourary moderators, they will have to actively police effectively
every question to make sure that the jokers and incorrect answers stop getting voted up, and will likely have to intervene a lot. Currently, in the DF-related forums, there isn't actually a need for moderators. Difference strongly in favour of forums.
- Finally, the forums have and will continue to exist successfully. Stack exchange
was tried out - and it didn't happen. Difference strongly in favour of the forums.
Again, trying to impose a stack exchange on the community is trying to fill a need that does not exist with a system that would not be better. As G-Flex pointed out, it's not that stack exchange is 'bad,' it's that it is not an appropriate choice for this community, especially one that already has the working systems of a great, prompt and polite forum community, a wiki chock full of information, and an IRC channel, and we really don't need another system. As C4lv1n has mentioned, stack exchange has also already been demonstrated to have not worked in the past. The need does not exist, and if it hypothetically did, stack exchange would
not be a good way to fill it.