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

[Yao Ziyuan]

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