I think the topic titles will be the same as with Common Bugs now, like
"Configured repositories in Discover jump around in the list" or "Clipboard
is not shared with KDE virtual machines".
The site name, "Ask Fedora", makes me _want_ to force them into the form of
a question just... to make it all nice... but in practice most topic tiles
are in the form of a problem summary already. ("Closing the laptop lid does
not turn off the screen", "2-finger scroll occasionally disabled".) So I
think that keeping to the current title format is good.
The topic titles wouldn't work as questions, I think. Imagine "Why do I have no sound in F35?". There can be several different issues related to sound, and so you need to distinguish them right in the title, to allow people to find the right one. So e.g. "F33->F35 upgrade might break sound", "Creative sound cards don't work in F35", "HDMI sound redirection is broken in F35", etc. The title is only created after the problem is well understood.
I can go either way on whether the first post in the topic should also
provide the solution, or whether we should used the answer-solution format.
As I'm reviewing some of the previous wiki pages now, I actually am kind of
inclined to think that it's better to have stronger problem/solution
separation. But I could be convinced either way.
I feel a bit like wasting the reader's time to let them first read through a question, and then follow a link to a marked solution. I know this is how it would look if it was a regular question-answer topic in the forum. But the wiki style provides a more efficient and readable way to learn about high-profile issues (straight to the point, exact), and going to a forum style would be a downgrade.
> 2. In the Common Issues category, will the topics look the same as in 1)
> (we'll simply re-tag them there), or differently? (e.g. a question-style in
> Proposed, a solution-style in actual Common Issues).
I was thinking just move them, yeah.
So in order to provide good readable descriptions to our users (solution-style), they would either need to be written in this style also in Proposed Common Issues, or rewritten into a new topic. So the actual "why is X broken? - have you tried Y? - and what about Z?" discussion would occur probably elsewhere, in some generic Ask category, and once properly discovered, somebody would rewrite it into a solution-style topic into Proposed Common Issues, where we would verify it and promote it (move it) into Common Issues if it's good enough. Does it make sense, am I imagining it correctly?
> 3. Can we easily move a topic (or add a tag to it) into the Proposed Common
> Issues category, when it is currently in a completely different one? And
> similarly, we can easily move out a topic from Proposed Common Issues to
> some generic "Ask" category?
Yes to both. And URLs for topics do not include the category, so moving them
will not break any existing external links.
What about changes to topic titles, do they change the URL? (That would be very inconvenient, perhaps even a deal-breaker).
> 4. The solution text often needs maintenance. Some clarifications, newly
> discovered workarounds, etc. If the original solution text was created by a
> community member, is it expected that we'll simply edit his/her post? Or
> what do we do? On wiki, it is owner-less, which avoids the problem
> "somebody edited my post, and it's still displayed under my name, but those
> aren't my words, and I don't like it".
So the process
There is a setting "Make new topics wikis by default" which we would enable
for these categories. It doesn't make the post ownerless, though. I think we
could set these expectations reasonably in the description of the category.
That might work. I think it also implies that you'll not simply take some topic from a general Ask category and tag it into Proposed Common Issues, because that wouldn't convert it into wiki style, wouldn't be in a solution-style text, and also the topic authors might be negatively surprised.
So, we'll need a way to tag interesting topics in general categories as "look, this might be a frequent and important bug", and then a set of volunteers who sift them and convert selected ones into Proposed Common Issues, and then QA goes through those and promotes some of them into Common Issues. Ugh, is it too complex?
> Overall, I don't have strong opinions on the proposal. A wiki is easier for
> us, but otoh more community involvement would definitely be nice. We could
> try a different approach as an experiment. If we do, it might be good to
> start it right away, so that some initial problems are resolved before the
> F36 cycle runs in full swing.
That does seem like a good idea. Maybe not quite _right away_, but soon.
Would you suggest duplicating the F35 Common Bugs, or making some _possible_
F36 ones based on Rawhide issues?
I'd start with F36. There won't be many users complaining about F36 before F36 Branched/Beta in there, but that's OK, we can at least experiment with the process.
Just to be clear, I'm still not convinced this is a good idea :-) But why not try it. Perhaps we'll then come up with some mixture of both approaches, or at least realize some shortcomings.