Design issue:
The design emphasizes asking questions rather than retrieving existing ones. It also doesn't seem to facilitate storage of common questions.
Background:
The greatest flaw of the wiki concept is inefficiency. Consider this, what is the question always asked by users? How many times has it been asked? How many person-hours and resources and money has been wasted answering the same question over and over again over the 15+ year wikimedia projects have existed? Finally, how many times has it been asked in other language projects? The answer to all those questions is that nobody knows. As it stands this system will make things worse by making it too simple to ask questions without verifying first.
Concrete issues:
- The design has a checkbox asking to include a title.
- There are three basic types of questions asked, each needs its own flow:
- Technical questions - without platform details.
- Trivia questions - "Why is there a naked picture???", "Is blue pokemon tougher than green?", "Why can't I add my blog?". A good number of these are worthless, the rest should probably be directed to the article talk page instead of a help desk.
- Topic related questions - These questions may be useful and may help improve the page.
- Spam question - someone just writing random stuff there
Possible Solutions
- Never allow the user to ask a question until they search first.
- Never allow a question without a topic.
- Always include page title as always an important context, oldid revision is also important.
- Most importantly, it would be preferable to have a way for end-users to promote certain questions to the help pane. Maybe each newbie reply would come with a link that enables users to save the question with a standard answer. This would increase the pool of questions / answers, and overall reduce the eventual work.
Improving questions
- Technical questions
- These must always (not optionally) require platform details (OS, Browser, etc). It is a waste of time to ask users these questions as follow-up.
- It should also never be simply unstructured because it will result in a lot of unactionable or invalid reports. See VisualEditor/Feedback for a lot of messy questions, see also T86956
- End-users often break their own interfaces using badly designed gadgets/ userscripts and browser extensions. First advise them to try to access the page using safemode, for example, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/pagetitle?action=edit&safemode=1, and possibly temporarily disable the extensions.
- Trivia questions - should be discouraged, and the interface should attempt to strongly indicate these are not the point before the user posts a question.
- Topic related questions - may need to go to the talk page instead of a help desk
- Spam question - Add some basic anti-vandal measures, e.g. don't allow single repeated character, e.g. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA", have a sensible input length limit, maybe add captcha when questions include a link.