[Foundation-l] A proposal for a Wikimedia project that helps people find solutions to their problems

[Yao Ziyuan]

How best to lead the user to his specific problem can be learned from
practice. It could be "branching out by category", or "branching out
by symptom", or a combination of both.

Above all, the point is, it will be so natural for a Wikipedia article
like "Air conditioner" to include a "box" that says "Troubleshoot your
air conditioner problems at WikiSolve"! It will sound so natural to
have such a sister project.

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 7:02 AM, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 20 November 2011 06:22, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Step 1: Initially, the wiki's category system takes you to a broad
>>> problem type "My air conditioner doesn't work".
>>> Step 2: On that page, the wiki will say: "Check if the air conditioner
>>> is plugged in. Does this solve your problem? [Yes] [No]"
>>> Step 3: If the user clicks [No], the user will be taken to a further
>>> page that says: "Check if there is too much dust in the air
>>> conditioner. Does this solve your problem? [Yes] [No]"
>>> Step 4: If the user clicks [No], the user will be taken to yet another
>>> page that says: "Check if the air conditioner is out of refrigerant.
>>> Does this solve your problem? [Yes] [No]"
>>> Step 5: If the user still clicks [No], the user will be taken to
>>> another page that says: "Contact maintenance personnel."
>>>
>>> As you can see, such a wiki-based troubleshooting process gradually
>>> isolates the user's problem by letting him choose symptoms, leading to
>>> increasingly specific problem pages.
>>
>> That doesn't sound much like a wiki to me...
>
> Well, that's an exaggerated example to demonstrate what "symptom-based
> problem isolation" is. In practice we may not need to create a new
> wiki page for each "step"; we may as well compress the above steps
> into a single page. But you know, when a problem gets too complex
> develops into several variants or subproblems, we may need new "main
> pages" for these derived problems, just like a Wikipedia article may
> branch into new articles to describe a detail in depth (e.g.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#History leads to a new main
> article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia ).
>
>>
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