Images: The HOWikis standard is large full width images, but left or right aligned images aren't against the rules. It's just that square centered images are the preferred format. If the image you mentioned is good, why not center it and see how it looks? Just change |right| or |left| in the editor to |centered|, set the size to 600px, and see how it looks with preview. If it looks bad, cancel your edit and restart (since all you did was test how the image looked).
Questions: When someone asks a question, we prompt them for a little more information so we can have a better idea of exactly what they need help with. For example:
Question: "How do I tie my shoelaces?"
In this case, does the person want to know how to tie a single knot, a double, or perhaps they are trying to tie boots, which might be different if they have very long laces. Suddenly a question that seems very obvious and simple on the surface to the person asking the question becomes impossible to accurately answer.
Examples like this taught us that while everyone wants help with their question, not everyone knows how to ask for that help with relevant information. That is what the second part of a question is - relevant information. It's where we get more information from the user. This helps us, but it also lets us tweak a question so that other people reading it get the help they came for too. Here's what the first example should look like in our new system.
Question: "How do I tie my shoelaces?"
I want to join the military, and I'm already in ROTC. The problem is that my boots come untied whenever we have to run. I'm too embarrassed to ask anyone to show me how to tie the laces, but if I keep tripping and falling, they'll kick me out. Help!
See how a little extra information completely changes the question and the tone of it? Now, if we have the same question asked multiple times, we can either delete the extra ones, or change them so that more people are helped. The most important part being that we never want to have duplicate answers on the same page.
A more important thing to remember is that when you see the same question over and over again, there's usually a problem with the article. Even if the article has good information, it might not be reaching everyone who needs help. In these cases, it's a good idea to double check the article. Many times you'll find that key steps were unintentionally skipped by a writer who was very knowledgeable about a topic, and forgot what it was like to be a new user.
For example, a computer tech might say to download and install a file, or clear the browser cache, never considering that the average user has no idea where their downloads folder is, or what a browser cache is. This would leave the user lost, and they would ask for help. As a result, you would see many questions about downloading files or clearing the cache. These sorts of questions are all an indication that an article needs some work (which is why it's being edited).
Does that all make sense? We've continued tweaking the system to guide people towards asking better questions, which lets us give them better answers. This helps more people. and that's what we're all about. It's also why we're always interested in suggestions that might improve the question and answer process.
