The question wizard might be useful for Meta Stack Exchange too; should we give it a try?

Question

tl;dr

Due to the special nature of Meta and the high rate of "lost souls", should we try out the Ask a Question Wizard here on Meta Stack Exchange too?

General idea

In case anyone doesn't know yet, there is finally an Ask Question Wizard. It guides new users towards writing better questions.

I think that such a question wizard would be useful on Meta Stack Exchange too, for three main reasons:

1. Meta is different from other network sites. There are four types of questions on Meta, each represented by the different required tags: bug, feature-request, discussion and support. Especially bug reports can often be split into a certain structure (what's wrong, how to reproduce, why I think it's wrong, examples). The same holds true for feature requests. Such a structure is ideal for a question wizard.
2. Quite a few users get lost on Meta and ask off-topic questions here. While the Meta community is well prepared to deal with these posts quickly, they lead to an less-than-ideal first impression by the new users and they distract the community from more important issues.
3. Site-specific questions are often off-topic. This might not be always clear for new users since nowhere is it hinted at in the help pages (and there are a lot of old, not-yet-closed SO-specific questions from a prior era of this site) and can lead to unnecessary drama. If we add an honeypot into the wizard to catch this case (and ideally redirect them to the proper meta site), we could prevent this.

As Sonic said, there's an advice page new users need to read and confirm. However this doesn't really prove effective right now and we might need to try stronger tools (e.g. question wizard).

Therefore I think that we should test the Ask Question Wizard here on Meta too.

Implementation details (help welcome)

I think the wizard should have six main entry points:

1. I want to discuss a specific post or action from any Stack Exchange site. (-> honeypot, redirects to the appropriate per-site meta)
2. I have a question regarding the use of Stack Exchange sites (-> support mode)
3. I think I found a bug while using the Stack Exchange sites (-> bug mode)
4. I have an idea for improving the Stack Exchange sites (-> feature request mode)
5. I have a discussion I want to start about Stack Exchange communities or their rules (-> discussion mode)
6. I have some other (e.g. programming) question (-> honeypot, redirects to https://stackexchange.com/sites)

Coming from these choices, the user would either be redirected to a landing page explaining, why this is not the right community and offering some alternative choices or they would follow the guided assistant.

For 1. the user might be asked on which site the post/action is. Maybe the system could show the three sites where the user was recently active/has the highest reputation on.

support mode would ask the user for these details:

• what do you want to achieve?
• what have you tried?
• what is your current problem?

bug mode would ask the user for these details:

• bug description
• how to reproduce the problem
• why do you think that this is wrong?
• (possibly) examples

feature request mode would ask the user for these details:

• what is your goal?
• how do you think could this be achieved?
• why will the community benefit from this change?
• (possibly) details

discussion mode would ask the user for these details:

• which rule do you want to propose/clarify
• (optionally) examples/why is this rule required?

Note: the above implementation details probably require some revision. Feel free to edit/suggest improvements for both wording and details.

Answer 1

I think it's a great idea to enable the wizard here, as we do get quite a few blatantly off-topic questions every day, for various reasons I've chronicled in a post you linked. The interstitial page was enabled on this site recently, and it clearly states this site's purpose, but it did very little to stem the flow of such questions, enough that I thought it wasn't enabled for some reason.

I'd recommend a couple minor changes, though. First, per Robert Cartaino's comment, I'd recommend splitting off the sixth option in your current selection of options into a new top-level option, so that at the top level, you have the following two options:

• I have a question about the Stack Exchange software or a Stack Exchange site
• I have another question (e.g. programming, math, etc.)

The first option would then lead to the first five of the six options you enumerated.

Second, rather than simply redirecting users of the second option to the list of sites, I think we should make it clear that site recommendation questions are on-topic (we don't get very many of these). I'd make that option display the following page (adapted from the existing interstitial page):

I have another question (e.g. programming, math, etc.)

Welcome to Meta Stack Exchange! Unfortunately, your question probably isn't suitable for this site, but we likely do have another site on which you may be able to ask your question.

If your question is about...

• ...Programming, then ask it on Stack Overflow
• ...General computer stuff, then ask it on Super User
• ...Some other topic, then check out our many other fine sites! (Be sure to check the help center to see if your question would be on-topic.)

---

Having trouble finding the right site?

If you've looked through our list of sites but you can't find the right site to ask your question, you can ask which site is a suitable site here on this site.

Ask a site recommendation question >>>

The part shown below the horizontal line would be hidden initially, and only be shown if the user clicks on one of the links in the top part and navigates back to this page.

I think that with these changes, we should enable the wizard here on this site.

Answer 2

Actually I think there should or could be an universal question wizard that tries to suggest a site to sent the particular question to, depending on the contents of the question text (probably matching some magic keywords). A bit like eBay tries to suggest the correct category for an article you are selling.

I think that many beginners don't have an overview which SE sites exist, and what is the best one to ask their question (many probably hit a specific site after Googling for their specific problem first, then are tempted to ask at the site they were directed to).

So it looks reasonable to me to let users start at some generic site to compose a question, and when it's about to save it, the wizard should make some proposals the user can pick among.

Once a site was selected, the wizard could be refined for site-specific rules (e.g. recommending tags to use).