QAWiki:Guide/Questions

Guidelines for creating questions

Here are some tips for writing questions and linking them with other related questions:

• The main label for the question should be quite specific, while aliases can provide more informal ways to ask a question. The main label should thus reflect as closely as possible the meaning of the query (and vice-versa). A good example might be "Which countries have a female head of state?". While it might be more natural to ask about female presidents, female prime ministers, queens, etc., these are questions with different results (and should be treated as distinct questions). Another example might be "What movies were directed by Mira Nair?", which is better than "What did Mira Nair direct?" for the main label as it specifies that we seek movies, not TV series, video games, etc.
• Ambiguous questions like "What is the largest country in Africa?" are welcome, but they should be tagged as instance of the class ambiguous question and should not provide a query. Ideally, each ambiguous question should link to one or more candidate questions that the user might mean, such as "What is the largest country in Africa by population?" and "What is the largest country in Africa by area?".
• The goal of QAWiki is to create a diverse collection of questions and queries. In general, we do not recommend generating many instance of analogous questions, such as "What is the capital of X?" for many values of X. A single instance, such as "What is the capital of Ireland?" is often sufficient, where other examples can be generated automatically. However, there may be cases where it is useful to have several manually generated instances of an analogous query (that vary only in their particular selection of entities); this may be due to different meanings of a word (e.g., working capital of a business), different types of entities (e.g., the capital of a state vs. country), to capture different subtleties (e.g., the gender of the entity and how it affects the expression of the question). If one wishes to add many specific instances of a question (whose query varies only in its subject/object entities in a one-to-one manner), we recommend using the analogous question property to link these instances; for example, see "When did Stan Lee die?" linked with "When did Ian Curtis die?".