Help create and maintain community FAQs!

Question

Joel's recently blogged regarding wikifying question on several recurring topics where users keep asking new versions of the same problem.

Some of these are:

• anti-virus software and cleaning them up,
• solving boot problems, _{^{(<--- This has answers for BIOS phase and Windows. Anyone want to do linux and osx?)}}
• freezing computers,
• troubleshooting hardware,
• benchmarking hardware,
• backup software,
• finding drivers,

Many topics would benefit from having a great up-to-date source of information, a Community Wiki. If a user tried most of those steps and still is having problems, then there might be something new going on.

This isn't a goal to create one "perfect" mega-answer, that we can use to close all the others as dupes, but rather to have a more general guide for users to follow and catch all the lowest hanging fruit.

The purpose of this question is:

• to keep track of the progress,
• to get suggestions for topics that could use such a question,
• to manage some 'meta-ish' discussion, so we don't abuse the comments on the wiki questions,
• requests from users for including certain information or sharing useful information to include

Answer 1

As a means to help users find these sorts of answers (because honestly, most of the people posting "what antivirus should I get" questions don't read tag wikis), it might be helpful if there were a special tag for these sorts of questions. It could be implemented like the faq on Meta: a question which could be one of these general guides would be tagged with community-faq-proposed, then once it had enough quality information, a moderator (and possibly 10K+ user?) would retag it to community-faq, at which point it would appear as a special color. To make it easier for users to find these sorts of questions, new users posting their first questions could be directed to check the community-faq pages before answering, and community-faq questions could be highlighted in the "possible dupes" box that appears when creating new questions. This would help to make sure that if a question already has a general version out there, users see it, so they don't get completely burried in the thousands of other questions here.

Answer 2

I have already tackled the computer freezing questions through asking about this previously. From the ideas of both Jeff and TomWij I have created a set of three questions that tackle the general troubleshooting of a computer freeze.

• manually creating a dump

• troubleshoot the actual dump itself

• troubleshooting harware related crashes

I feel like this is the best approach and will help to eliminate the clutter of multiple questions while still avoiding the "Super Question/Answer" that is literally impossible on questions such as these.

Answer 3

Great idea -- I recommend starting with the best answer and using that as a template to generalize it and make it applicable to a bunch of common scenarios.

However as Ivo points out, don't try to make the "one perfect answer that fits all scenarios"! That's impossible and you'll kill yourself (and the reader) trying. Just put together a slightly more generalized version that handles a few tightly related common cases, and see where that gets you.