Hello All,

What I want is a wiki that indexes problems and each problem's wiki page will also document solutions to that problem. Since problems and their solutions are documented by humans, our remaining problem is how can the wiki index problems efficiently?

Problem base (PB) wikis already exist, such as WikiHow and WikiAnswers. But I think they're not well-organized enough. For example, WikiHow has a category called "Air Conditioning" which collects solutions related to air conditioning:

http://www.wikihow.com/Category:Air-Conditioning

As you see, there are no subcategories in this category. All solutions are just listed in A-Z order. A person must scan these solutions one by one to find a solution that matches his problem.

What's the ideal PB in my mind? Under a topic like "Air Conditioning", the PB should further categorize problems in three ways:

1. By symptom ("What's wrong?")

2. By task ("What do you want to do?")

3. By component ("What component is your problem in?")

Each of the above can walk a user down several levels of subcategories until actual problems come into sight. This is what I call "well-organized".

"By symptom" and "by task" are actually approaches that categorize objects (here, objects are problems) by function, while "by component" is an approach that categorizes objects by structure.

Best Regards, Ziyuan Yao