Integrated Q&A site tools via a web API
Godot version: Godot 3.2+
Issue description: There are a few common problems that I hear from the Godot community:
- People don't utilize the Q&A site often enough, frequently asking their questions on random social media like FB, Reddit, Discord, or forums before they've properly checked the official, indexed resources for such things (or just flat-out now reading the docs). This leads to people re-answering many common questions and wastes a lot of time.
- Many people report the API documentation to be insufficient for illustrating how to use the engine's objects. A frequent suggestion to improve it is to create a more wiki-like experience where people can freely add or remove content from the data publicly, but the docs team reasonably responds with saying that this completely breaks down the quality control that git provides. Git has a high barrier of entry for those unfamiliar with it (even if it's not complex in practice, the uninitiated can have a very difficult time grasping its workflow / capabilities - I know I did). Furthermore, there's a persistent desire to keep the in-engine documentation as brief and to-the-point as possible which runs in contrast to a desire for anyone and everyone to contribute answers to "how to use" questions that get voted on by others.
- There already exist documentation on what a method does / what an object is for (in-engine XML API docs, tends toward compactness, requires git/xml knowledge) and how to do general conceptual things like how to build a UI, how to animate things, or how to use the HTTPClient (godot-docs ReStructuredText tutorials, can be as detailed as needed, hosted online, requires git/rst knowledge). None of these easily enable community contributions for laymen, nor do they give "the most popular" solution to a problem.
- There is also not an ideal place for documentation that involves small-scale programming questions, such as "how do I create an 8-directional character controller?" No one wants to go sifting through the docs for a tutorial that might answer their question, and the answer to their question, if it is in a tutorial, would be jumbled in with a whole host of other information they may not need. The API docs aren't even designed to contain questions of that sort. The Q&A site is really the best place for them, but for some reason the accessibility of that site seems to be poor in comparison to other places. Many either don't even know about it, or are simply not in the habit of checking it.
I believe that these problems' could be improved by defining a web API for the Q&A site and defining an interface within the editor that allows people to ask their questions directly from there. Perhaps even creating integrated tools in the API docs so that prefilled questions can be generated. We could also then use the tagging system in the Q&A site to generate links in the in-editor API docs. For example, if I had a question tagged with "Object.connect", I might then end up generating a link in the API docs for that function that would allow someone to visit the Object's API docs, find that method, click the link, and immediately jump to the relevant Q&A site question in-editor.
Anyway, just some ideas to toss out. WDYT?