Taking the Answer Questions tool
at face value, it’s really simple to use. Choose a category, answer or flag questions, get a new topic. However simplistic it is, I feel like it could be better. If I were a new user who has a passion for chemistry, for example, I wouldn’t inherently know that the chemistry category is bundled up within “Education and Communications”. I personally would look at that and conclude that since I have an interest in neither education nor communications, then I wouldn’t be knowledgeable about anything contained within those umbrella terms.
I believe that allowing the user to search through categories using a keyword would be an improvement. Typing in Animal Jam would bring up all of the categories that have Animal Jam in the title, etc. This could function alongside the current system as well.
However, that begs the question: how are wikiHow’s categories separated into these umbrella terms? Not every category is featured under these; so if I had a great amount of knowledge on a niche topic, would I have to go find articles themselves and answer questions that way? And in that same vein, should I hope to find questions about physics within the science category? If so, why is chemistry separate?
Just a thought
Anna
2
Cheers for the food for thought, @Tiagoroth
! Thanks for sharing your impressions - always good to have some fresh perspectives when someone is new to a tool, to get an update on how it’s working as you dive in with fresh eyes.
As you can probably tell, the category structure there is based around our own article categories, to stay consistent to the site, but I know for a newbie to our structure, it can take some hunting and pecking to find what they’re looking for. Not every category is included because of engineering limitations (basically, we have too many categories to include them all in a stable way that’ll scale to the numbers of users in the tool at any given time). So the selection that’s in there is mostly crafted based on what areas are getting the most numbers of questions, along with some categories added because of special requests from community folks who plan to dive in deep in particular areas. If you have a category you plan to answer a ton of questions on, let me know - I can always pass that on to Alissa and the developers to see if we can squeeze another one in!
This is basically Answer Questions 2.0 at this point - initially, things were even more limited, but you may have missed the first release. So you never know what might be doable in the long run, either in small tweaks or as a “3.0” release. I do know there’ve been a few ideas kicked around post-meetup about more of a search or keyword-based approach to the tool, for example - sounds somewhat similar to what you’re talking about. No promises at this stage, again because of engineering and stability issues at scale, buuut it would be neat if it came to be! I’ll add your vote into the mix for it
