Interviews, questions and learning material

Answered on 4 October 2026. Interview remains a type with searchable Q&A presentation. Course and Lesson keep distinct meanings with evidenced membership and order. See the recorded decisions. The questions below preserve the alternatives reviewed; no further answer is needed for these two distinctions.

Original review. The earlier naming review proposed treating every slash-separated pair as synonyms. Removing a slash does not establish that two words mean the same thing. These recommendations preserve the useful differences; the other pairs remain on the review agenda.

1. Interview is a type; Q&A describes the presentation

I recommend keeping Interview as the type and making Q&A a defined, searchable presentation. An Interview is organized around eliciting a person's or several people's answers, experience or views through questions. It can be written, audio or video, live or recorded, edited or asynchronous. A short interview inside a larger piece does not automatically classify the whole piece.

Q&A means material presented as questions and answers. It can describe an interview, an audience question session or a FAQ. An FAQ answering recurring support questions is not automatically an interview. Preserve who asks and answers when evidenced; do not invent an interviewee because the page uses question headings.

Two checked examples show the difference:

• YouTube's Pedro Pina article describes an audience-led Ask Me Anything and calls the linked recording an interview. Those descriptions can overlap. The article was read; the recording was not watched for this review.
• Microsoft Learn's FAQ answers recurring service questions. The inspected page does not present an interview exchange.

Your choice: keep Interview as a type with Q&A as a searchable presentation, or define Q&A as its own whole-piece type alongside Interview. I recommend presentation because it also describes existing forms such as FAQ. Neither option makes the two names universal aliases. Exact storage and browsing headings remain separate reviews.

2. A course and a lesson keep different meanings

I recommend keeping Course and Lesson distinct and connecting them when the source establishes membership. A Course is an organized learning resource or program directed toward learning goals. A Lesson is a focused instructional unit, which may stand alone or belong to a course. Neither duration nor file format alone decides the difference.

Microsoft's Generative AI for Beginners explicitly presents a course with topic-based lessons. Its introductory lesson has its own learning goals. The course also connects written lessons, videos and code. These are related resources, not alternate names for one item.

Someone should be able to find a lesson, open its course and move to other known lessons without duplicate copies. Preserve the publisher's order when given, without inventing prerequisites. An independently useful tutorial can also be a lesson when both descriptions fit. A course advertisement is not the course, and a course landing page is not evidence that we captured every lesson.

This proposes meanings and browsing behavior. It does not create a new campaign kind or settle whether a particular course uses an aggregate content record or another container. That physical representation must follow the verified relationship model, including courses delivered in one file and lessons reused across courses. Original titles remain available.

Your choice: preserve distinct Course and Lesson descriptions with evidenced membership, or use one broader Learning Material type with course-versus-lesson scope kept separately. I recommend the distinct descriptions because people may deliberately seek a complete course or one focused lesson. Do not make Lesson an automatic alias that saves as Course.

What the bounded audit checked

The earlier approved list includes Interview / Q&A and Lesson / Course. The later naming rule requires clear names, but does not approve these synonym merges. The approved whole-piece, document-part and evidence rules remain in force; the decision record keeps that history.

The selected live registry check found an active Interview entry and an inactive Q&A entry, with no alias attached to either. It found no Course or Lesson entry among the selected names. Existing records include interviews and tutorials in both text and video. Stored labels are not proof that every item was classified correctly, and absent labels do not prove absent material.

The current local type writer and filter use the piece's type value. They do not establish a working course-to-lesson journey. A bounded search of live relationship names and parent columns did not verify that journey; it is not a full absence proof. Before implementation, trace collection, containment and order, classification, corrections and retrieval together. Preserve entity, product, campaign, publication and capture relationships without inferring them from a type.

No database, prompt or classification changes have been made. Answers here settle only these two parts of the old naming batch. The current agenda retains all other pending decisions.

Last reviewed 4 October 2026.