Guidelines for asking questions and answering them

First draft, please make this page better.

How to ask questions

This section may move to its own page

1. First check MoinMoinQuestions and search the wiki for answer

2. Describe the problem in a clear way:
   • What do you try to do? why?
   • What is the result you get? paste relevant error messages
   • What is the expected behavior?

   • Describe relevant details: MoinMoin version, platform

3. When your question is answered, help by removing non relevant information.

Maybe we should add more? It must be short, or nobody will read it

• Ridiculous, kinda. 85% of the questions on the page are already solved by the wiki. We should rather ask ourselves: "Why did not they find it in the help pages?"
  • One reason could be that the information is not in the help pages. Help can not contain the solution to all problems.
    • Indeed. But most are in the help pages.
  • Another reason is people do not read help and manuals - it takes too much time.
    • But reading the current questions page is a time consuming task as well - simply because it contains many answers.

How to answer questions

1. The purpose is to help both the person who asked the question, and other people that will have the same problem.
2. Move the question to the correct sub page now - before we have huge unworkable page
3. Do not move questions too soon - users may not find it on the next arrival in the wiki. A week should be enough.

4. Remove non relevant information - neither someone's IP nor name is interesting, the gist of the MoinMoin error message (containing the right keywwords) is very interesting, people may find the answer by searching the error message.

5. Make the question generic as possible - if its not a specific Debian problem, there is no need to mention Debian in the question.
6. Try to give a simple answer, point to more information in this wiki

   • Do not create extranous pages if the answer is already there - search first

7. Don't try to hide problems - we are not "selling" to anyone! If something is hard to do, describe how it is hard and why.
8. Check that your answer is correct
9. Be friendly, it's not the user fault
10. Don't discuss these guidelines on questions pages - this is the place for this discussion.

Workflow

One possible workflow is this:

1. People ask questions using a form on MoinMoinQuestions

2. The question answered on the question page or on topic sub page
   • It might be hard to find the question and the answer if you move the question from the original page to another page.
3. Some questions show a problem in the system, when we change the code they are not relevant any more, unless you use an old revision.
   • Do we need a release number relevant to each question?
     • We should just deliver answers that are relevant to the latest version in the stable branch and the current unstable one.
4. Some questions are integrated in the help
5. Some questions left in the questions pages
6. Others are moved to our FAQ

Things to think about:

• What we do with questions that are simply answered by other pages? there is no much point in answers like "See ThisPage".

  • Sure. And check linking. Maybe they did not find it because it is not linked correctly.

Discussion

Nir, why do you think that these 3 paragraphs contribute to the user's experiences of searching for categories?

• They describe what is the difference between the different searches and why there is no one recommended way to do this. This is an important moin problem - the user should know about it.
  • Besides the second last sentence, nothing describes the reasons for that problem in those paragraphs IMHO.

Sometimes the solution is always described somewhere in a context the user did not have searched / looked for. Therefore I have written the action macro RecommendPage. By this it is quite easy to create a user page whith links belonging to the themes he/she has missed before. This page is named to the !UserName/!RecommendedPage. I think a simple way must be given to give an individual answer to a user problem. In the next step the FAQ could be improved. -- ReimarBauer 2005-05-31 18:14:58