Troubleshooting Guide

[Connor Imes]

Dougie Richardson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've posted some comments on this on the specification page:
> 
> * I'm not convinced on the need for this. Troubleshooting guides are great
> for situations where the user is unable to go straight to Google for the
> answer (such as connectivity issues). In the sited example, I can see most
> users typing that dpkg message into Google. That may well send them to the
> forums, it may not. I am also not convinced that we take the forums as the
> font of all knowledge because in many situations there is some well
> intentioned but extremely misguided information and there is no method of
> reporting such information as bugs, as there is in the system documentation.
> -- ddrichardson
> 
It is true that information on the forums is not always correct, and
varies between computers.  However, I am not opposed to a FAQ on the wiki.

> * Some of what is being proposed here is not troubleshooting, it is FAQ.
> Faws are OK for forums with huge numbers of people who don't search the
> forum before posting a common questions and in situations where there are
> limited options. Defining what should and should not be in an FAQ is a
> massive task that, frankly, I see little value in, especially when people
> are more likely to follow a topic or search based approach to finding the
> information they need. -- ddrichardson
> 
I think that for now, since we have so much other work to do getting the
wiki up to date, we should leave it up to the forum helpers to create
the FAQ and make use of it since they know that domain better than this
team does.  There are currently two FAQs being used (and I see nothing
wrong with having both for now):
from the doc team: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CommonQuestions
from the Ubuntu Forums Beginners Team (under development):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Beginners/FAQ

I think that it is best to let the Beginners Team handle the FAQ, then
later we can combine them into one if appropriate.  They really do know
the forums best and because of their continued presence there, they can
keep the FAQ up to speed with problems that are appearing on the forums.

There is no such thing as a FAQ that covers everything, there are simply
too many problems that require one on one help, which is the advantage
to using forums in combination with the wiki.

In short, I think it is better to focus our efforts on the rest of the
wiki and let forum users (and the UF BT) compile the FAQ from existing
documentation - new documentation can certainly be written for pages
that don't exist yet.  I (and some others on this mailing list) would be
happy to guide the UF BT for that since we are also members of that team.

Thanks,
-Connor