Re: Is there a FAQ on how to format postings?

---------

Chris Lewis (clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca)
Tue, 13 Dec 1994 21:21:21 -0500

On Dec 13, 11:26, pshuang@MIT.EDU wrote:
} Subject: Re: Is there a FAQ on how to format postings?
} clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) said:

} > We should be assuming a minimal level of common "competence". If a
} > prospective FAQ author doesn't know how to use their editor, they
} > couldn't post anything properly in the first place, and would be
} > unlikely to even consider writing one.

} Hmmm. I don't want to pick on Chris in particular, but I couldn't let
} the above statement pass without comment. We should be careful not to
} paint FAQ maintainership as some sort of technical priesthood. The
} measure of success of an FAQ maintainer should be how informative and
} useful his or her postings are to the target audience, not whether he
} or she is technically competent at handling an editor. Someone may be
} an recognized expert on a particular topic and be altruistic enough to
} expend considerable effort in writing and compiling information for an
} FAQ, and yet not know how to convince editor and news posting software
} to do what he or she wants; if their efforts at creating an FAQ are
} rejected out of hand simply because of their technical incompetence,
} that would represent a wasted opportunity.

I don't want to pick on you either, given, say, the near "RTFFAQ" about
faq-maintainers bounces ;-), but I consider it rather ironic that the FAQ
maintainers think that somehow there should be a FAQ created to discuss
various random editors, when these editors are ALREADY documented much
better than a person trying to cover more than one editor is likely to.
Further, as someone else mentioned, general guidelines about posting
are already in FAQs. The documentation already exists. Why write more?

We say RTFFAQ! - and the news.answers moderator team does that more
than most... We should be saying RTFM! too.

I hardly suggest that we reject the technical novices - far from it -
we wouldn't be writing FAQs, now would we? But there are limits to
how far we should spoon feeding the universe, especially when the
documentation ALREADY exists.

} (Granted, there is a certain minimal technical competency barrier in
} effect for FAQ maintainers to get their postings approved for
} *.answers, although we try to do what we can to keep that low. The
} existence of the faq-server posting service, and our approval of proxy
} posters [i.e., person FOO maintains the contents, but person BAR takes
} care of the technical details of posting], are specific examples of
} things which help lower some technical barriers.)

Double ironic, because I'm doing autoposting of several other people's
FAQs, because, while they can master their editors, master the format,
master their subject matter, and post just fine, the *.answers hoops
are more than they want to understand *just* to post faqs.

-- 
Chris Lewis: _Una confibula non sat est_
Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
Latest psroff: FTP://ftp.uunet.ca/distrib/chris_lewis/psroff3.0pl17/*
Latest hp2pbm: FTP://ftp.uunet.ca/distrib/chris_lewis/hp2pbm/*

[ Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive | Search Mail Archive | Authors | Usenet ]
[ 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 ]

---------

faq-admin@landfield.com

© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved