Intelligence

Wiki-Based Problem Bases

The Idea

Wikipedia has been a good demonstration of a wiki-based knowledge base (KB). But it only indexes "facts", not "problems" and "solutions". What about a wiki that collects every problem in the world and their known solutions, namely a wiki-based problem base (PB)?

Implementation

There have been wiki-based PBs like WikiAnswers and WikiHow, but I think they're not well-organized enough. For example, WikiHow has a category called "Air Conditioning" which collects solutions related to air conditioning (http://www.wikihow.com/Category:Air-Conditioning). As you can see, there are no subcategories in this category. All solutions are just listed in A-Z order. A person must scan these solutions one by one to find a solution that matches his problem. What's the ideal PB in my mind? Under a topic like "Air Conditioning", the PB should further categorize problems in three ways:

    1. by symptom ("What's wrong?")
    2. by task ("What do you want to do?")
    3. by component ("What component is your problem in?")

Each of the above can walk a user down several levels of subcategories until actual problems come into sight. This is what I call "well-organized". In theory, "by symptom" and "by task" are actually approaches that categorize objects (here, objects are problems) by function, while "by component" is an approach that categorizes objects by structure.

I have notified existing PBs like WikiAnswers and WikiHow about my idea, and their responses were positive.

Wiki-Based Problem Solving

The Idea

George Polya's famous book How to Solve It says if you can't solve a problem ("P0") directly, you can use certain strategies (e.g. divide and conquer, generalization, specialization and analogy) to derive new problems ("P1", "P2", ...) from the original problem (P0). If you can solve any of these new problems, you can apply your solution back to the original problem. If you can't, you can derive third-generation problems from these second-generation problems. So the whole problem-solving process is like developing a "tree of problems". A wiki could be an ideal means to keep track of such a problem tree, especially when multiple people are solving a problem collaboratively.

Implementation

There was a now-defunct website called "QEDen" that tried to use a wiki to collaboratively solve the Clay Millennium Prize Problems.

Recently the mathematics community has also begun experimenting with wiki-based research collaboration.