During the development of Stack Overflow, Joel and Jeff talked about the answers staying up-to-date in a wiki-like fashion. I think what the author means is that in order to participate in this - i.e. edit and improve an existing answer - you have to have a certain amount of rep.

It's quite likely that a user Googling for their particular issue might find an incomplete or out-of-date answer on Stack Overflow. When they finally solve it they are unable to improve the existing entry, which is unfortunate as for many "long tail" problems they are best placed to contribute.

This used to be true, but there's a feature currently in testing that will allow anyone (even someone coming from Google) to propose an edit to a post. This edit proposal can be approved either by a moderator or several users with sufficient rep. Hopefully this will make Stack Overflow more wiki-like and help solve the problem with answers getting out of date.

This sounds similar to how Discogs has implemented quality ratings (via votes) for arbitrarily edited content, in between full editorial control and open wiki.

That sounds like a great idea to me

I think thats a big problem with the "accepted answer"

Firstly it's accepted by the questioner - who by definition knows the least about the subject, otherwise they wouldn't be asking!

Even if it is correct and well written - then it stays accepted years later when it's no longer the best way to do something.

The temporal nature of best practices is my biggest complaint with how SO works. It works great for relatively static subjects, but its useless for fast moving technology targets due to the community resistance of duplicate questions.

I have 170 rep and I don't know how I've gotten that much since I rarely post on StackOverflow. It's really easy to gain rep if you participate with the best answer you can give, instead of trying to post lots of less-elaborate answers just to have a bigger audience.

yeah, but that's not what the author is complaining about. the problem is that stackoverflow has reputation barriers for performing various actions, so until you acquire some rep, your site experience is pretty broken. this is well and good if you intend to put some effort into building up reputation so that you can participate fully, but it works against someone who uses the site casually but who has useful things to say.

I think the idea is to build a community - in order to use SO as more than a Google scrape you need to put in some work and become involved. Then you are more likely to go back and add answers yourself - so you contribute to the collective.

"someone who uses the site casually but who has useful things to say." will quickly get a lot more than 50 karma, so it doesn't really work against them at all.