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 <yaoziy...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> On 20 November 2011 06:22, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziy...@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 ). > >> >> _______________________________________________ >> foundation-l mailing list >> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l >> > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
