[Foundation-l] A proposal for a Wikimedia project that helps people find solutions to their problems

[Yao Ziyuan]

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)