For most of the desktop apps I use, the MAN pages and Web documentation offered to users by the apps' developers seem to lag a couple of versions behind the code.

However, using Google brings its own problems: as other posters here have commented, you tend to find more people asking the same question than you find answers.

Even on forums that do have the answers, they're often buried on the tenth page of "me too" comments responding to the question.

Those forums would be a lot more helpful if, from time to time, someone went through and deleted the cruft, or edited every posting of a question to include a link to the answer, so that the useful information would get a better pagerank.

Better yet would be if someone were to paste the useful answers into a Wiki page, editing them to include some context, and make clear which versions of the app and which distros the answer applies to.

But who would that someone be? Where would we keep the Wiki page? And how would we credit the poster of the original helpful information, and the owner or operator of the forum where they posted it? (If you don't think that's important, then you haven't understood the psychology of a lot of these forums and their users....)