Hello Jimmy Wales and other Wikimedia Foundation members,
I'm writing you to propose a Wikimedia project (tentatively called "WikiSolve") no less important than Wikipedia.
We know Wikipedia can teach people knowledge (in terms of concepts), but it can't directly help people find solutions to their problems, because it's "concept-oriented" rather than "problem-oriented".
I envision a wiki that collects virtually every known problem in the world and their corresponding solutions, so that people with a problem in mind can find a solution on it.
The key problem in designing such a wiki is how such a wiki can guide the user to the problem page he wants. I believe a hypertext-based mechanism called "troubleshooting wizard" is the answer. A good example of a troubleshooting wizard is http://support.hubris.net/dialup/wizard/ . As you can see, this is a way for the user to locate his problem in a wiki without knowing keywords used to name or describe that problem, just like Wikipedia allows a user to locate a concept without knowing its name or any keywords used to describe it.
There is actually more background to this idea. I strongly recommend you read the following article that compares how AI and a wiki tackle two old problems differently: knowledge representation and problem solving:
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(A formatted version of the following article is at https://plus.google.com/u/0/102291835965130378165/posts/finzeoipR7A)
From formal to semi-formal: knowledge representation and problem
solving in the AI way and the wiki way
1. Failure of the formal way to represent encyclopedic knowledge Big thinkers like Leibniz, Dijkstra and John McCarthy all dreamed about an encyclopedia written in formal language and an automated reasoner that could solve a problem by reasoning on this formal knowledge base. Unfortunately attempts at this like the Cyc project still have a long way to go.
2. Success of the semi-formal way to represent encyclopedic knowledge In contrast, Wikipedia is a big success. Most stuff on Wikipedia is written in natural language, but Wikipedia does have some formal elements. Most fundamentally, each concept on Wikipedia has a unique formal name, and there are hyperlinks between related concepts, enabling the user to navigate to a target concept without initially knowing its name (which makes Wikipedia an important "global positioning system" (GPS) for concepts).
3. What would be the wiki (semi-formal) way to problem solving, then? When it comes to "problem solving", there are actually two kinds of problem solving:
3.1. Wiki-based solution sharing The first kind is when you have a problem already solved by experts, and these experts want to create a wiki as a "solved problem base" where you can easily find your problem and consequently see the corresponding solution written by these experts. Now the question is: how can such a "problem base" wiki be organized so you (the user) can find your problem easily?
What I want to say is "troubleshooting wizard". Do a Google search for [ troubleshooting wizard ], and the first result is a good example of what it is like: http://support.hubris.net/dialup/wizard/
As you see now, a troubleshooting wizard uses a series of questions to let you specify your problem's characteristics (or "symptoms"), and eventually leads you to a solution to your specific problem. You will find this immediately familiar because you probably already saw this kind of thing in Windows XP's Help System.
Now you can realize that a wiki as a hypertext system can surely implement a troubleshooting wizard that walks the user to his problem in a "problem base" wiki.
3.2. Wiki-based problem solving The second kind is when you have an open problem that doesn't have a known solution (otherwise you're supposed to find its solution in a "problem base" wiki as discussed in Section 3.1). Now if you want to attack this open problem on your own, creating a wiki may help, for the following reason.
During your problem-solving process you may need to divide the original problem into subproblems, or apply certain strategies such as "generalization", "specialization" and "analogy" to the original problem to obtain some "derived problems", whose solving may help you solve the original problem (this is what George Polya's famous book "How to Solve It" talks about). To keep track of these "subproblems", "derived problems" and other kinds of middle results, a wiki would be a great organizer.