gah, you know what could really do with an entry on this site? lwIP

How do we flag topics as pointless? For instance docs-beta.stackexchange.com/documentation/improvement-requests/… and this parent topic docs-beta.stackexchange.com/documentation/java/176/…

@JAtkin you can downvote if you think the example is unhelpful

oh wait, do you mean the whole topic, not just the example?

The whole topic is part of the other one.... No merging needed, all of it is just duplicate information...

yeah

yeah, either a new option should be added or an existing one expanded a bit

On SO there are common questions where the heart of the matter is usually a NullPointerException. Would it be pertinent to include NPE resolution as an example in docs?

For example... Topic: Common Exception resolutions. Example: NullPointerException resolution.

@Knossos That seems a big topic to me. Do you think NullPointerException could be it's own topic?

Yes, it certainly could. Most of the time questions are simply set as duplicate of a generic "How to fix NPE" question. That could probably be made more friendly with applicable documentation. Infact, a separate topic for NPEs would probably make a lot of sense. (if these topics would even fit into the scope of docs. I'm still not sure that they do)

One way to find out! ;-)

Request a Topic?

> There are Questions that come up repeatedly whose root cause is poor documentation. If you see a bunch of people struggle with Foo's Bar class, with Foo's documentation on Stack Overflow you could fix the Bar page and mitigate a source of repetitious (often exact duplicate) Questions.

@Knossos Exactly.

Sounds like a plan.

@JAtkin coming to a docs-beta build in the not distant future

deprecated is a little narrow for a whole topic, basically

@KevinMontrose Yep, honestly I can't think of ever using the deprecated flag, I mean, that's what the version tags are for.