Can we reduce questions with model-specific troubleshooting manuals?

Thanks for the idea, mayer. I agree. I think Answers should be a place for experts to exchange knowledge, and to work together on hard problems. I think that the emphasis on answering simple questions repeatedly has diluted our collective expertise, and made the good information harder to find. Our 'merge as duplicate' feature was a start toward fixing this, but that's not enough—we have to reduce the number of questions.

iFixit already has answers to at least 80% of the questions people post. We need to do a better job of pointing people at that information and preventing duplicate questions.

Here are a collection of ideas I have to put mayer out of a job. What do you think of them? Can you think of anything else?

1. When people type in their question, automatically search for similar questions and suggest they read those first. We've actually been working on this for a while, but it's tricky to do this search well. We're getting close.
2. If you have less than 10 reputation, make users click through a page explaining how to ask questions first. (a la stackoverflow).
3. Discourage users from asking questions about 'new' devices (which are often typos). We'll require they tell us manufacturer name and year, and actually click 'add new device' to the database before they can ask a question about something new. An alternative suggestion is to only allow people to ask questions about 'new' devices if they have over 10 reputation.
4. If they specify a device we have a troubleshooting question for, show them the list of solutions on that page prior to posting the question. The troubleshooting pages are a really underutilized resource, and I'd love to give you guys an incentive to spend time updating them rather than answering questions.
5. Create canonical documents for certain frequent questions like water damage and password resets. Then, we can suggest those pages to users trying to post questions with words like 'password', 'login', 'liquid', and 'orange juice.' The big question here is how this scales: dealing with water damage on a cell phone is very different than on an automobile.

The goal is to help people fix things, but we can only help those willing to help themselves. If they're not willing to put time into a good question, they probably won't be willing to take the time to fix it either. Let's build a framework that teaches people to communicate effectively.