I'll make this a more formal public proposal then. I haven't ever looked at the code for this site, but I imagine that this functionality would be relatively easy to implement. (Along with those thousands of other "easy" requests that vroom probably gets every week)

The idea is to construct the Q&A section from the bottom up rather than the top down. Each question and each answer would contain some additional meta information, namely, a few keywords or key-phrases (like "CGI Programming"). The category list on the front page would then be constructed from the keywords in the database.

On immediate glance, this seems like a horrible idea -- thousands of stupid keywords cluttering up the Q&A main page, miscategorized questions, question posted to every category. However, I am assuming that vroom is going to go through with the plan to restrict write access to the Q&A section to just a few trusted monks. In this case, a new cross-categorization scheme would have a number of advantages:

• fewer clicks by initiates and other newbies to get to the right information, hence less frustration
• good, comprehensive answers that answer more than what was asked could be posted under all the appropriate categories (should threads remain intact everywhere as well? hmmmm...details...)
• more in the spirit of everything code -- many more cross links as opposed to the current strictly enforced hierarchy in Q&A
• Q&A would more resemble the cross linked knowledge bases that are actually in use by help desks everywhere

As far as practical implementation details, I have a few suggestions. Start by giving every existing question and answer a default keyword based on its existing categorization. Once you transition to the trusted-monks plan, give them rights to add/edit keywords. Appoint or get a volunteer with good technical writing/editing skills to keep an eye on the Q&A section structure to make sure it doesn't get unwieldy. I'm sure you'd have no lack of volunteers to do these things (I do it on a volunteer basis for lots of other projects) -- it strikes me that Perl Monks has more monks than it has work to keep them busy.

Right now, the Q&A section is like a technical book with a table of contents but no index. Information resources like this site need to be optimized for information retrieval. SOPW is optimized by virtue of the vast number of monks just sitting around waiting to be of service. But SOPW is not truly scalable -- the quick question gets the quick answer, and with a great number of questions, wrong answers are going to slip through. In addition, it should be implicit that people RTFM before posting to SOPW. Tutorials are for slow contemplative reading. In contrast, Q&A is part of a gigantic distributed disorganized perl self-help resource, and needs to be usability-optimized for getting the answer to your question as painlessly as possible.

e-mail neshura

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