Integration with Ask Ubuntu

[Jorge Castro]

It would be cool if manpages.u.c was integrated with AU so people can ask questions about the manpage they are reading about, and see other questions that users might have for that tool. I was thinking on the left column for each page, under the manpage
sections you'd have 2 links (Using dd as an example):

_Frequently Asked Questions_, which links to:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/dd?sort=faq

_Ask a question_ about dd: which links to:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/ask?tags=dd

This will autotag the question as they ask it (it degrades gracefully if the person doesn't have enough reputation to create a tag, since I'm sure we don't have tag for everything with a manpage). The FAQ bit is autogenerated, which means if no one has asked something more than once that has been marked as a duplicate, it's empty (like the dd example). An alternative would be to have "Top Questions" and then link to this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/tagged/dd?sort=votes, but over time I think having it just be a FAQ would be useful. Feel free to just decide which is better, we could have just three links but that seems overkill.

Also, the link should use the binary, not the source package, as the user might not know the source package while they are reading the page.

[Volker Siegel (vsiegel)]

Very good idea!

But there is a possible problem - it would direct new users to askubuntu, and it is hard to tell which kind of mixture that is:
 - in terms of being interested in particpating with askubuntu - helping to handle the higher work load
  - in terms of average question quality, as handling low quality questions is a lot of work

So, it's hard to tell, but this could be a real problem.
But, for a controlled, it would be possible to control the load of new users if needed,
just by changing the presentation of the linking to askubuntu,
like changing 'flashyness', or font size/contrast/guidance.

Really, I think this idea can be extremely useful, if it works.