While I respect the degree of technical expertise you can get on SO, I am very much convinced this is a failed experiment which will slowly collapse on itself. And I think that because the organization of the site is completely at odds with it’s professed goal.

SO is not really a forum, because time is supposed to be irrelevant : a 12 years old answer takes precedence over a question asked now, failing to consider that, maybe, the context of this question has changed. Its ridiculous, especially in the context of software engineering.

On the other hand, it’s not a library either : a library is a collection of book, which are relatively self-contained knowledge systems. And in practice, the SO answers are not self-contained. They merely answer a specific point, with no guaranteed coherence from one to another, so a beginner cannot use them to build a broad understanding of a subject.

To take the analogy of the Cathedral and the Bazar, I am under the impression that SO members are trying to build a cathedral out of the stone sold by hundred of bazaar people, and refuse to see that fact that all stones all having different sizes and dimensions is maybe kind of a problem when you build a cathedral.