> I stand by my comments. the distinction between FAQ writing and good
> hypertext document creation is blurring into oblivion. Yes, there is an
> art to both. But *anyone* can do this. It is nothing but *good
> editing*. I don't understand what you are saying. Is it-- `faq writing
> is hard. therefore, we should limit the people who are allowed to do
> this.' well, @#$%^&*
I'll buy the premise that FAQ writing and good hypertext writing are not
so different from each other. However, I submit that if you think just
anyone can do this in an adequate fashion, your standards of adequate
are far lower than mine. Good editing (*AND* good writing, also
required) are not skills which everyone on the net possesses.
(With respect to "limitation" based on quality, I will note that the
guidelines for submitting FAQ's to *.answers limit themselves to
necessary headers, and deliberately leave FAQ format and content
unspecified. Whether Suzy Smith wrote a good FAQ or not is not something
which the *.answers moderators are concerned with, because that
subjective judgment is best left to the intended audience. Note that not
all FAQ's have to be cross-posted into *.answers; those which are not
cross-posted are only subject to RFC 1036 and RFC 822. Thus even those
FAQ writers who find the guidelines too restrictive are not blocked from
distributing their FAQ's and letting natural cream rise to the top, so
the speak, in what's probably one of the closest things on the net right
now to a centralized, controlled information distribution warehouse.)
To get back to the previous paragraph of mine, just because I think good
writers aren't *THAT* prevalent on the net does not mean that I favor
centralized content-based selection/approval/blessing for what people
produce, because I can forsee many problems with such a schema. However,
there are many evolutionary and non-evolutionary developments in
information retrieval on the net right now; I'd be much more interested
in following up on and supporting the ones which help people find what
they want (in terms of quality and content) than to rave and flame about
the horrible dangers of a centralized something-or-another manned by an
elitist corps, when there is little danger of such a thing being imposed
on the net. And if such a thing should end up being created on a
non-imposed basis and it become extraordinarily popular because it
serves the needs of people on the net better than non-content-based,
non-centralized sources, then so be it.
> I see. Well, God, how *should* FAQs be? if your definition includes
> any terms like `they should be approved by an elite corps' or similar
> cliquish exclusionary euphemisms, I think I don't give a @#$%^&*
> about what you think of how FAQs should be, and frankly I don't think
> anyone else in future cyberspace will either. The most important
> aspect of FAQs today is that *anyone* can write one and submit it
> into a public server.
Your flamage here makes no sense. If anything, it is you who has been
more or less implying that FAQ's all are structured as lists of
hypertext references to other things on the net, and the person you were
replying to pointed out that many FAQ's don't fall into this category;
this is a broader, not narrower, mindset. As with "summaries to the
net", I personally prefer FAQ's that don't just include by reference
inclusion some ridiculous amount of textual data (note the distinction
between textual data and *INFORMATION*), but provides some valuable
content in and of itself.
(An analogy in the non-computing world might be the difference between a
dry bibliography simply listing books and their ISBN numbers [thus
making it "easy" to find the book at a library], and a heavily annotated
bibliography, explaining what material from that source the author found
personally the most interesting, what the author used from that book in
his/her own book, what materials were covered in further detail in that
source which the book couldn't really touch upon and do justice to, main
thesis, etc. I find the latter to be much more useful to me most of the
time and informative in and of itself, although the former is certainly
easier to grind out and has its usefulness, too.)
> I am not claiming that *everyone* should create their documents that
> point to their favorite resources. I'm saying that everyone should be
> *encouraged* to. The valuable information will naturally rise to the
> top as some people delegate to others, *voluntarily*. but any system,
> which your rhetoric seems to mask, where there are *imposed* decisions
> from an elite cadre of FAQ Priests, I say we can eliminate *immediately*.
No one has suggested that, for example, WWW servers be required to
undergo licensing by an "elitist" board of any sort. Nothing of the sort
could be imposed on a distributed information system like that. It seems
to me that your apparent paranoia on this topic is unjustified.
-------- cut here --------
> Medusa pisses me off, because she doesn't understand the concept of
> honesty and morality. it is not *honest* to manipulate a vote. since
> Medusa exists, though, and is tenacious, we are going to have to design
> technologies that prevent cheaters-- those people who corrupt a system
> and say that their actions are justified because the system is corruptable.
Switching to a list admin person hat, I'd like to cut off this specific
line of personal attacks and references right here. Enough.
--- Yours in Leadership, Friendship, and Service, Ping Huang (INTERNET: pshuang@mit.edu), probably speaking for himself
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