Re: Notes Status, 24899 total

Larry,

> On Aug 15, 2020, at 11:01, Larry Garfield <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Inquiry from the new guy.  To what extent should a high volume of comments be viewed as "problems to fix" on a given page, vs "meh, whatever, it may as well become a forum."  I tend to dislike doc pages with lots of comments as it implies the page itself is incomplete, and the resulting comments are not always of consistent quality (or accuracy).  I don't know what the convention is here these days, however.  Please advise before I try hacking at any of these pages. :-)


Others can probably answer your question better than I, but I thought
this would be a good time to interject that many of the user notes on
the site are so out-of-date they should be buried or removed entirely.

One of the biggest criticisms I’ve heard of the PHP manual over the
last few years is the quality (or lack thereof) of the user notes. In
the past, the PHP manual was lauded for its depth and breadth, but now,
in the days of Stack Overflow and similar sites, the answers to common
problems are more readily available, and folks seem to look to the user
notes to find answers, but they aren’t finding them there, so they see
this as a detriment.

Perhaps the time of user notes in the PHP manual has come and gone, and
maybe it would be best to direct folks with questions to the `[php]`
tag on Stack Overflow. Better yet (maybe), each manual page/section
could specify a unique tag for that part of the manual, which would
make it easier to link users to the answers they’re looking for.

This is just an off-the-cuff thought from me, something I’ve been
thinking over for a while. If there’s interest in this, I’m happy to
help make whatever changes we decide.

Cheers,
Ben


> On Sat, Aug 8, 2020, at 11:22 PM, [email protected] wrote:
>> Following are the top 20 pages of the manual, sorted by the number
>> of user notes contributed. These sections could use a polish, those
>> notes represent 3.9% of the 24899 total user notes.
>> 
>> Notes  |  Page
>> -------+---------------------------------------------------------
>>  123  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php
>>   53  | http://php.net/manual/en/soapclient.soapclient.php
>>   51  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php
>>   49  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php
>>   48  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-merge.php
>>   46  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-map.php
>>   46  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.ucwords.php
>>   46  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.ip2long.php
>>   45  | http://php.net/manual/en/ref.exec.php
>>   45  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-ini-file.php
>>   44  | http://php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php
>>   44  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.register-shutdown-function.php
>>   44  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-diff.php
>>   44  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.glob.php
>>   43  | http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php
>>   43  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php
>>   43  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.ftp-rawlist.php
>>   42  | http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.patterns.php
>>   41  | http://php.net/manual/en/function.fsockopen.php
>>   41  | http://php.net/manual/en/mysqli-stmt.bind-param.php
>>

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