On Fri, 11 Apr 2014 21:30:31 +0200, Caig wrote:
2014-04-09 18:09 GMT+02:00 Jim Henderson
: I see too the many users requesting over and over the same questions. More difficult is to see how many users just find by themselves the answers they need.
Practically impossible, really, because while you might have page hits, you don't know what they were looking for, or if they found the answer on the specific page they visited.
Probably some of them use the wiki (or try to do so), if the statistics available here http://en.opensuse.org/Special:Statistics are reliable, in the last 24h (20:00 - 20:00 CET) the English wiki received ~50937 visits (I save the data since some times). At least a fraction should be real users.
Sure, you'll always have some robots that are indexing or scraping the site.
There will be always the "lazy" users, but a more user-oriented* wiki could be useful at least for the rest (even to give a link to the lazy ones :P).
In a little over 20 years of doing online support, I can say that while there always have been lazy users who have just asked rather than doing some research first, this trend has increased from what I've seen. What's more, it's exacerbated by the fact that many users don't provide enough information (some because they don't know what to provide, even in terms of basic information - like DE or oS version), so it takes several exchanges to get the information needed to make a proper diagnosis. Many just don't know how to ask effective questions, so we get the functional equivalent of "my thing's broke." Often times, users with some experience will actually try to include useful information, but often times will only guess about the problem rather than describing what they're actually seeing (or including actual screen output). "I get an error message" is far too common, without either context or the actual text of the error message.
Wiki context-reachability (from YaST for example) probably it's too difficult/not doable.
* For example (borrowing ideas from the first thread message): - right-to-the-point guide (the SDB...the potentially more useful namespace currently hidden by the search default settings...) - easier instructions (GUI way) in the first place and then, if really needed, the more cryptic ones for the geeks (that probably don't need them...)
I think, perhaps, what we need to do is put together some sort of "new user survey" to find out the sorts of things new users find they need to know or would like to learn about. We know, for example, that installation of multimedia codecs is something we see a lot of requests for help for, and as most of us are very seasoned at adding the Packman repo and switching the packages over to that repo (installing whatever it is we need from there when relevant), it's not as clear-cut to a new user as it is for the experienced user. But what we need to identify is what leads a new user to ask (for example) on Facebook rather than the forums (or to even read the sticky that explains multimedia to them) or to go to the wiki. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org