Here's an idea for a method of answering common automotive questions by distributing the job among a large group of online automotive communities. Any automotive forum leader could participate, this project requires only a basic knowledge of HTML.
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Most tech forums spend a lot of time covering the same questions. This is especially true for automotive tech forums, because conclusive answers to basic automotive questions aren't well documented or accessible, online or off.

In automotive tech forums, members or groups of members often write articles, designated posts, or FAQ answers for their most common questions. This usually slows the flood of similar questions, but it doesn't solve the problem. Automotive tech questions are difficult to answer with a single article or post.

Users are often referred to the forum search function to answer their common questions. This gets the job done, but it's tedious work with unorganized information.

As a result, most tech forums spend a great deal of their time repeatedly discussing the same information. This prevents community growth and development of new knowledge by wasting precious human and intellectual resources on performing repetitive and tedious tasks.

This is something that most tech forums already know anyway. Besides, when you hang out in an online tech community for long enough, you get a feel for which questions always come up. We can definitely notice this on the Hotrodders Bulletin Board. Like other forums, we've done some rough initial analyses too, like these distributions of top brakes questions, top steering questions, and top suspension questions.

It seems like, for each automotive system, there are only a small handful of common questions that consume half the resources in an online tech community. Although these questions are few in number, they're difficult to answer conclusively.

For example, a question like "How do I choose a carb?" is very common in online automotive communities. And, it's hard to answer with an article, a single post, or by using the search function.

An excellent solution would be an organized resource that contained all of the different types of information related to a certain topic: articles, diagrams, tech data, discussions, photographs, external links to related websites and webpages, etc. It could all be categorized and linked to from a single webpage, and routinely maintained and updated. Although it would be tedious to assemble, when completed, it would be the best "How do I choose a carb?" page on the web.

Creating and maintaining such a resource is a lot of work. A single automotive community could definitely make a best-on-the-web answer to a common automotive question. But conclusively answering all of the top automotive questions is much too big a task for a single site.

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Community development of shared knowledge isn't a new concept. Nowadays, wikis are especially useful for collecting and organizing best-of-the-web resource pages. But wikis are more geared to developing encyclopedia-like content, not to answering a relatively finite group of topic-specific questions.

A group of online automotive communities, working together, can easily handle this task. Here's how:

• identify the top 100 automotive questions by analyzing a large group of discussions (10,000 or more)
• have each participating online automotive community choose 1 question that they will be responsible for conclusively answering
• each individual automotive community can assemble the resources to provide a best-on-the-web answer to their chosen question
• when complete, all of the participating sites would link to each other for best-of-the-web answers, and/or to a central page we can host ad-free here on CrankshaftCoalition.com

On Hotrodders.com, we've already done a little bit of work like this, assembling "Clusters" of information around common topics. It's a lot of tedious work, but it's worth it when it's done. You end up saving resources, and it's fairly easy to get good search engine rankings for such high-quality pages.

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Knowledge for automotive enthusiasts is widely scattered and unorganized, and a lot of sites are wasting time and resources repeatedly answering the same questions. The basic concept of distributing the workload, and giving each website the credit (and the visitors) for authoring a conclusive answer to a single common question, has yet to be tested on such a large scale. I believe this method will provide quality tech-oriented traffic for automotive webmasters, and the best possible automotive information for end users.

I'd be very interested to hear what anyone has to say about this. If you have comments, suggestions, or criticism about this idea, please post in this thread.

Jon,

I like your ideas about making some standard FAQ and How to sections. At least that is what they usually end up being called.

At DOT ORG, a FAQ section was started with a list of commonly asked questions. Any one was capable of posting an answer. This lead to the HOW TO section being created. The HOW TO section is open to any member that wants to tell how they did something or post an answer to commonly asked questions.

All too often, we still direct newbies to the how to section. There will always be the types that are too lazy to read the main topics, enter the appropriate section/forum and read the stickys. Many do not realize the search functions available to get them every thread with info.

One HOW TO I feel should be done quickly is HOW TO USE THE SEARCH FUNCTION. I haunt a couple of PLC forums as I do PLC programming more and more as a part of my "JOB". I have noticed the same "mannerisms" there I see on the S truck forums I visit. I see those that have no clue how to use the forums, members that get "pissy" because newbies always asking the same "dumb" questions, and a core of members that work to make the board a good place to hang out at.

When we added the Tech Editors at DOT ORG, I asked a member to become one because he and I had discussed previously about our similar backgrounds with tech writing. His knowledge proved quite usefull. I pm'd him when I discovered this site and gave him the link. He joined almost immediately and used his knowledge to post a good link to here with the site information at dot org. Since then, another Senior member of dot org joined here.

With luck, word of mouth will help get the talent necessary to develope this site into a good for lack of a better phrase, CENTRALIZED CLEARING HOUSE of INFORMATION.

I have NO idea about web development and hope to be able to use what is posted here to broaden my horizons while I share my knowledge.

Exactly -- centralized clearing house of information. While many automotive sites have topic-specific knowledge, we share a lot of the same information, so we might as well organize it from a centralized source.

The "search FAQ" is an excellent idea. Before we even start doing specific technical FAQ's (how to choose a carb, how to repair a body panel, etc.), we should probably do a general "How to Find Automotive Information on Websites" FAQ. That could include how to use Google, how to check a site for FAQ's/How-To's/Sticky Posts, how to use a forum search engine, how to post a well-formed technical question, etc.

I think we'll find that most of the web development knowledge will be coming from the younger guys, and most of the automotive knowledge will be coming from the older guys. Every once in a while I bump into someone who knows computers and cars very well, but not too often.

A search engine can't compete with picking the brains of a collection of auto experts who are sitting around waiting for a question. Some things can be reduced to a HOWTO and be more efficient at answering a question. An example would be removing dents from a panel. Others need expert eyes and minds on the problem. An example would be, "what happened to my paint?" There are so many variables that search results could lead down so many paths that the car could be nothing but rust and photos by the time all answers were checked. Efficiency of finding answers is key to a collection of information.

If the collection can be finely categorized, summarized and outlined so that users can quickly dig through it in multiple ways, it can work. If the quality of search results are highly dependent on picking the right terms or phrasing the question properly, it won't compete well with live experts.

My thought was that such a list would be fairly finite. Maybe 100 questions?

The key would be to do it without needing a search engine. We can put them all on one page, organized by automotive system. Then, we wouldn't have to deal with the semantic issues that accompany keyword-matching.

Removing dents from a panel is a *perfect* example of one of the top 100 questions that can be answered with a "consensus" article.

The difficult thing would be numerically establishing consensus. We could have representatives from automotive boards vote on the consensus. So, an article would pass, with, say 2/3 majority of the reps? Or, we could have votes on each board? Then, every board that had agreed to the consensus would have their url listed on the article. One thing's for sure -- we know our boards. Our Master List of Hotrodding Forums now includes 105 different forums. All that scut work of digging through search engines and directories to locate hotrodding forums will certainly come in handy .

The group consensus is what would make it powerful. The amount of information (measured in words, paragraphs, pages, etc.) wouldn't really be that large. Maybe the equivalent of a few books. The consensus would be very large. I haven't gone around and counted memberships at each board (it's a difficult number to estimate, as the official "member" count at each board isn't necessarily accurate) -- however, a decent rough estimate would be about half a million gearheads.