On 5/4/2010 5:16 PM, Yao Ziyuan wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
We definitely do not want to be giving medical advice to people. If you get that wrong, people die. Medical advice should be got by going to the doctors. Can you give another example of what your idea could
Yes, medical troubleshooting is both extremely useful and extremely sensitive, and that's why I said "Like Wikipedia, WikiTroubleshooting should cite credible references." We could put a warning and a disclaimer on every medical troubleshooting page telling the visitor to check cited references and other sources before adopting any advice.
A disclaimer would probably shield us from lawsuits, but there would still be a lot of ethical issues in "the free medical advice anyone can edit" (since we know most people won't check sources, especially print sources). Setting aside the issues of vandalism, even a good intentioned edit by someone who doesn't have adequate medical training could cause problems if they misread a source or use a source that isn't as reliable as they think. A lot higher standard for "reliable" would be needed for something like that.
How can a wiki implement a troubleshooting wizard? A wizard is a set of pages. Each page assumes you have specified certain symptoms (e.g. symptom1, symptom3, symptom5) of your problem and asks you a question to specify a new symptom (e.g. symptom10); then it redirects you to a next page that assumes you have specified symptoms 1, 3, 5 and 10 and asks you yet another question or shows you possible causes and solutions for the symptoms you have specified so far (1, 3, 5, 10).
Therefore they're just static HTML pages where each page can link to one or more "next pages". This is exactly what a wiki can do.
The main issue I can see (other than that for medical advice and the like), is that troubleshooters don't lend themselves as well to incremental building. A Wikipedia article with only a few sentences or a Wikibook with only a couple chapters are still slightly useful. A troubleshooter with only a couple steps is much less so.
Say you have a troubleshooter for a printer not working: 1. Is the printer plugged in and on? Yes 2. Is there paper loaded? Yes 3. Sorry, that's all this troubleshooter can help you with for now.