[Foundation-l] New project proposal: wiki-based troubleshooting

[Alex]

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.

-- 
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)