Question: The selling point of Documentation, and what made it so attractive and sexy was this:

> 
> Documentation will complement documentation where it falls through
> 
> 
> 

I'm unsure where I read it, there's another quote that is more recent:

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> Docs is intended to **solve the problem of bad documentation** for various frameworks out there.
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The important part here is that that was practically the only motivation (if anyone has tried reading MSDN some years ago, here's another victim) I had. BUT! There are documentation that is just that good, that anything more just spoils it. I'm unsure how to signalize that. Is there a way we can just redirect people that lands on certain topics to those documentation?

Answer: 
Being as it is my *first post*, I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce myself. I am Vasudha, the new product manager for SO Documentation. Am super thrilled to be here and I can’t wait to work with all of you to get Documentation to the right place!

The question you raise is a good one and one that we have been talking about on the team as well. We recently went through an extensive round of user research where we interviewed both users (with different levels of activity on Docs) and non-users of the product. A bunch of patterns emerged and we identified the top barriers and motivations to the use of Documentation. As part of that, the need for features that enable better attributing, linking and referencing of existing documentation, came to light. While SO Docs is example focused, and aims to provide users with more ways to apply the said topic; providing context, definition and enough information to make the topic clear and complete is a must.

The lack of such attribution tools have manifested in other ways - one of them being [plagiarism](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/346235/rolling-back-plagiarism-rejected), since some of our users that really like the content on a different site, choose to paste it onto SO.

We have also seen some good ways our community has gotten around this hurdle -

1. > 
> [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yMreH.png)](https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/android/85/getting-started-with-android#t=201704061905247523993)
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2. > 
> [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZsmE8.png)](https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/android/85/getting-started-with-android#t=201704061905247523993)
> 
> 
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3. > 
> [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MMVNH.png)](https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/c%2b%2b/206/getting-started-with-c-language/774/hello-world#t=201704101947126278575)
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Until we make attribution and linking officially available within the product, I’d be a proponent of the above approach. 

Without a doubt, we still stand true to what Kevin Montrose mentioned in our [first post](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-of-documentation-a-proposed-expansion-of-stack-overflow) to the community about Docs -

> 
> **What *should* be documented?** 
> 
> 
> Anything where we can actually make it
>  better. If a project already has awesome documentation that's easy to
>  search and cite, then there's no need to duplicate it on Stack
>  Overflow. We're interested in fixing what's broken with documentation,
>  not just moving them onto Stack Overflow.
> 
> 
> 

We realize we need to make it easy for the community to be easily able to point to such references. And that’s exactly what we intend to do!
Here is a suggestion of a light-weight way to do this. I think we actually need two distinct ways of sending the reader to the right place.

* A Topic Alias is just an alternative name for an existing topic in the same "Book". It shows up in the "topic finder", but when the reader clicks on it, they end up on the primary (aliased) Topic. This could be implemented as extra metadata on the primary Topic.
* A Redirection Topic is a "reduced functionality" Topic. It would have a title, and a remarks section, and nothing else. It would (should) not allow people to add examples, syntax, etc. The recommended way of using it would be to put a brief summary of what the topic is about, with links to other Topics in this and other Books where there the real material exists. Typically, there would be multiple links.

For example a "Unit testing" redirection topic in the "Java Language" would link to the separate Books on "Junit" and "TestNG", and possibly to a hypothetical Topic on unit testing in a hypothetical book on Software Development Practice.

The same model could be applied at the Book level as well.