Editing QAWiki:Guide/Questions (section)

=== Broader/narrower questions ===

When a user asks an initial question, they might find that the results are too broad or too narrow for their liking. To assist with this, QAWiki allows [[Property:P41|broader]] or [[Property:P42|narrower]] relationships to be defined between questions in order to suggest follow-up questions to users. These relations are intended to have a specific meaning. We say that question A is narrower than question B if (and only if) any answer to question A must also be an answer to question B, irrespective of the current data. We say that question A is broader than question B if (and only if) question B is narrower than question A. (Formally this corresponds to the notion of [https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~paris/cs838-s16/lecture-notes/lecture2.pdf query containment].) As an example, a user might first ask "[[Item:Q354|''What species are in the order Monotremata?'']]". Upon receiving the answers, they might notice that a lot of the species returned are extinct. As a follow-up, they might thus ask a narrower question like "[[Item:Q355|''What extant species are in the order Monotremata?'']]" (or "[[Item:Q356|''What extinct species are in the order Monotremata?'']]"). When adding these questions, we can define a narrower relation from the original question to the latter more specific questions, and a broader relation from the latter questions to the original question. Another example is the question [[Item:Q202|''Which science fiction movies star Uma Thurman?'']], which is defined to be narrower than the question [[Item:Q421|''Which movies star Uma Thurman?'']].