Is this a common trend for the whole docs?

It definitely seems like most experts have given up on it. Most posters that are still active seem to have poor to average knowledge about the topic and therefore write sloppy or incorrect articles.

Instead of becoming the canonical documentation over a certain tag, Documentation has now turned into a random dump of "this is cool", "this is a fun trick", "teh codez". Not to mention countless duplicate posts.

(Have a look at for example the C++ Documentation - I don't know if I should laugh or cry. For example, go look for info about the const keyword and const-correctness and you shall find at least 5 different categories about the same thing. None of them named type qualifiers, which would be the correct and formal category name. I would imagine this is because Average Joe has no idea what a type qualifier or a qualified type is, so he makes up his own category "stuff about constant variable things".)

Personally I stopped contributing pretty much immediately, because of the low quality, the lack of organisation and the lack of policies. So much crap was posted that the whole thing quickly went far beyond repair during the very first week.

At this point there is nothing that can be done but to either nuke all Documentation contents and start over with much stricter rules, or to ditch the whole project and move on.

Is Documentation failing?

I think it is. Take for instance one of the top 3 tags, the C# one.

The number of topics didn't change for weeks. The activity tab shows no update at all for the past 2 days, barely some additions for the past week, the majority being done by a single or two people.

I don't even talk about the quality of the last additions.

Once the initial easy-to-win reputation has been earned by rep-whores, almost no one else appears to be contributing anymore.

Is Documentation failing?

Maybe. It's probably a bit too early to tell.

(Warlords of) Documentation was meant to be an example centric approach to Documentation including unicorn points. It features tags, topics, examples, votes on examples, requests, reviews and now also discussions.

Activity was very high at the beginning of the public beta with a strong decline which is quite typical for many new things. Now we are in consolidation phase with rather low activity. Interest could pick up or the idea could die slowly. Time will tell.

So far activity is not zero. Let's take another tag, let's take the Android tag and you see multiple modifications per day. Is this too low? I don't know. You would have to compare with other documentation systems.

The Stack Overflow team showed commitment to improve Documentation. There are regular updates and new features. For example they greatly lowered the rep gains. So at least there is ongoing technical support.

Documentation does not seem to be extremely popular with search engines but that may be kind of expected given the age and the quality of the content (I experimented a bit and google seems to currently prefer other more established sources of documentation).

The true questions are:

• How high is the quality of the content currently?
• Is the system capable of delivering high quality content at least in the future?
• Is example centric the right idea?

I'm not convinced of that, but currently I'm also not convinced of the opposite. I'm just waiting and watching it. I'm only sure that if high quality content is there, search engines will eventually list it prominently.

Summary: A fair estimation is that probably no-one knows if Documentation is failing. It might be too early to tell. Stack Overflow team members should have more information/statistics, which maybe they want to share? Anyway, the only thing that is sure in my eyes, is that Documentation so far is not an overwhelming success. There were strong critical points always mentioned and the stance of Stack Overflow was as far as I remember that some things in life you have to try out.

So far, Documentation is not a success.

I asked for metrics in the comments; the suggestions I got were links, activity, and views.

Linking and activity:

Month      InterLinks ExtraLinks MinorEdits MajorEdits Topics Examples ProposedChanges ImprovementRequests TopicRequests Votes 
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ------ -------- --------------- ------------------- ------------- ----- 
2015-12-01 1          null       40         145        13     71       177             19                  3             112   
2016-01-01 3          null       36         205        34     86       183             32                  null          102   
2016-02-01 null       null       50         233        24     101      234             35                  1             163   
2016-03-01 6          null       99         689        126    351      640             194                 8             327   
2016-04-01 33         null       254        1197       216    617      1102            210                 11            610   
2016-05-01 6          null       44         131        18     59       151             25                  1             84    
2016-06-01 10         null       144        528        65     301      502             88                  8             433   
2016-07-01 560        363        7870       24390      3248   11653    29605           6243                1063          29228 
2016-08-01 349        586        2538       6035       802    2926     10966           2066                531           12402 
2016-09-01 291        344        1577       6971       1244   3313     4937            932                 347           6430  
2016-10-01 137        329        741        2469       444    1128     3263            620                 174           4924  
2016-11-01 109        286        673        1525       242    652      2631            374                 137           3640  

Views:

As with Q&A, I don't have a particularly good way of tracking views over time... So here's a graph from Google Analytics:

As with the activity graph above, this suggests an initial spike in activity when Docs went public, followed by a gradual fall-off over the next couple months.

Folks with the site analytics privilege can compare the shapes here to activity on Stack Overflow and other sites in their early days.

It was a fun beta, we now know what to expect of the system and its users. Now tweak some variables (reputation needed to participate, reputation needed to approve, vetoing and rollback rights) and implement what has been missing from the start:

Discussion / Talk

It was about the first thing I asked for in the closed beta, and I haven't seen it implemented in the year following it.

If you can't coordinate with your fellow users, if you can't explain to current and potential contributors what the documentation for a given tag is supposed to look like, the only thing you're going to get out of it is people throwing mud against the wall and seeing what sticks.

So implement that, archive all existing documentation and start over.

See also:

• Where to discuss how to organize documentation for a tag/topic?
• Where can we discuss guidelines for Documentation on a per-tag basis?
• Allow for Area 51-like mini-metas per documentation tag