I've talked about a wizard to help people find existing questions and improve the quality of the ones they post if they can't find one. I've talked about this for so long without doing anything so yesterday, I took some personal time and built it.

The system is essentially a flow-chart that can do data collection. We ask the user what their main symptom is and then can ask them more questions, ask for lspci output, search our existing questions and then present them with a list of existing questions, or pre-populate the Ask form. Believe it or not, all of that is currently working.

Of course it's nowhere near finished and it won't be implemented unless Stack Exchange loves it and I need help building example scenarios. Imagine a problem and work out what questions we'd usually ask in comments to answer it. These can be hardware or software but I think this is probably going to apply to hardware issues more than not.

I'm looking for the biggest, most recurrent and most consistently poor quality problems we see on the main site.

Here is my sole working example (and it's just a flimsy tech-demo so if you want to improve it, please do):

• Symptom: I can't connect to the internet
  • Input: lspci -nnk | grep net -A2, User selects right card, extract hardware ID
    • Search on hardware ID
    • Pre-populate the form with raw lspci data for the user.

Once we have a few ideas, I'll implement them in the wizard and publish it (it's a userscript at the moment) and we can decide whether it's worth showing to Stack Exchange.

I've talked about a wizard to help people find existing questions and improve the quality of the ones they post if they can't find one. I've talked about this for so long without doing anything so yesterday, I took some personal time and built it.

The system is essentially a flow-chart that can do data collection. We ask the user what their main symptom is and then can ask them more questions, ask for lspci output, search our existing questions and then present them with a list of existing questions, or pre-populate the Ask form. Believe it or not, all of that is currently working.

Of course it's nowhere near finished and it won't be implemented unless Stack Exchange loves it and I need help building example scenarios. Imagine a problem and work out what questions we'd usually ask in comments to answer it. These can be hardware or software but I think this is probably going to apply to hardware issues more than not.

I'm looking for the biggest, most recurrent and most consistently poor quality problems we see on the main site.

Here is my sole working example (and it's just a flimsy tech-demo so if you want to improve it, please do):

• Symptom: I can't connect to the internet
  • Input: lspci -nnk | grep net -A2
    • If there's more than one, the user selects right card
    • Search based on hardware ID
    • If the user says the results are bunk, we pre-populate the form with the raw lspci data, code formatted.

Once we have a few ideas, I'll implement them in the wizard and publish it (it's a userscript at the moment) and we can decide whether it's worth showing to Stack Exchange.