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

Sat Nov 19 14:46:01 UTC 2011

+1.

always thought it.

_____________________
MateusNobre
MetalBrasil on Wikimedia projects
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> Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 20:53:54 +0800
> From: yaoziyuan at gmail.com
> To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Foundation-l] A proposal for a Wikimedia project that helps people find solutions to their problems
> 
> 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:
> 
> ----------
> 
> (A formatted version of the following article is at
> https://plus.google.com/u/0/102291835965130378165/posts/finzeoipR7A)
> 
> From formal to semi-formal: knowledge representation and problem
> solving in the AI way and the wiki way
> 
> 1. Failure of the formal way to represent encyclopedic knowledge
> Big thinkers like Leibniz, Dijkstra and John McCarthy all dreamed
> about an encyclopedia written in formal language and an automated
> reasoner that could solve a problem by reasoning on this formal
> knowledge base. Unfortunately attempts at this like the Cyc project
> still have a long way to go.
> 
> 2. Success of the semi-formal way to represent encyclopedic knowledge
> In contrast, Wikipedia is a big success. Most stuff on Wikipedia is
> written in natural language, but Wikipedia does have some formal
> elements. Most fundamentally, each concept on Wikipedia has a unique
> formal name, and there are hyperlinks between related concepts,
> enabling the user to navigate to a target concept without initially
> knowing its name (which makes Wikipedia an important "global
> positioning system" (GPS) for concepts).
> 
> 3. What would be the wiki (semi-formal) way to problem solving, then?
> When it comes to "problem solving", there are actually two kinds of
> problem solving:
> 
> 3.1. Wiki-based solution sharing
> The first kind is when you have a problem already solved by experts,
> and these experts want to create a wiki as a "solved problem base"
> where you can easily find your problem and consequently see the
> corresponding solution written by these experts. Now the question is:
> how can such a "problem base" wiki be organized so you (the user) can
> find your problem easily?
> 
> What I want to say is "troubleshooting wizard". Do a Google search for
> [ troubleshooting wizard ], and the first result is a good example of
> what it is like: http://support.hubris.net/dialup/wizard/
> 
> As you see now, a troubleshooting wizard uses a series of questions to
> let you specify your problem's characteristics (or "symptoms"), and
> eventually leads you to a solution to your specific problem. You will
> find this immediately familiar because you probably already saw this
> kind of thing in Windows XP's Help System.
> 
> Now you can realize that a wiki as a hypertext system can surely
> implement a troubleshooting wizard that walks the user to his problem
> in a "problem base" wiki.
> 
> 3.2. Wiki-based problem solving
> The second kind is when you have an open problem that doesn't have a
> known solution (otherwise you're supposed to find its solution in a
> "problem base" wiki as discussed in Section 3.1). Now if you want to
> attack this open problem on your own, creating a wiki may help, for
> the following reason.
> 
> During your problem-solving process you may need to divide the
> original problem into subproblems, or apply certain strategies such as
> "generalization", "specialization" and "analogy" to the original
> problem to obtain some "derived problems", whose solving may help you
> solve the original problem (this is what George Polya's famous book
> "How to Solve It" talks about). To keep track of these "subproblems",
> "derived problems" and other kinds of middle results, a wiki would be
> a great organizer.
> 
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