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@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 20 November 2011 06:22, Yao Ziyuan yaoziyuan@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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