Last November I decided to take a weekend and put together what I thought of
then as a "minimal FAQ" for misc.health.diabetes. About 2/3 resulted from
pasting together articles I had posted over the previous few months. Many of
these I had written for possible inclusion in an FAQ, taking more care and
making them more general than I would for a simple answer to a simple
question.
I posted it as a draft and garnered a few comments. I incorporated these while
negotiating the news.answers submission process, which took longer than it
should due to software limitations on my end. I then started cross-posting
it. The FAQ got mentioned on a mailing list, and I passed out instructions
for getting it from rtfm in return. Over the last few months I've received
comments from quite a few people who obviously don't have access to Usenet --
enough that I'm thinking about adding a short section on "how do I read and
participate in misc.health.diabetes?". And perhaps renaming it just "the net
diabetes FAQ" instead of mentioning m.h.d.
Anyway, I found that after the first response to the draft posting, comments
from the newsgroup came in at a very slow trickle. Ironically, the quantity
of comments picked up dramatically right after I asked about dealing with
lack of feedback on faq-maintainers a couple of months ago. If I had waited a
few months to start cross-posting, a few parts would have been in better
shape because I rewrote them anyway, but I'd have actually had fewer comments
to work from.
Your milage may vary, depending on the nature of the newsgroup and the size of
the readership. But I'd urge you to go ahead and give a new FAQ a bit more
exposure by cross-posting it early.
A related issue is that there has been talk of modifying newsreader software
to present FAQs more aggressively to new subscribers. This might be done by
displaying articles crossposted to news.answers first so that the user is
more likely to notice them.
-- Edward Reid ed@titipu.resun.com (normal) PO Box 378 Edward_Reid@acm.org (forwarding) Greensboro FL reide@freenet.fsu.edu (seldom checked)
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