Re: FAQ education

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• In reply to: Mama Lani: "Re: FAQ education"

True, which is part of the reason I'm in the process of giving up the
rec.arts.comics.* FAQ (another part is that with 13 groups in the
hierarchy now, there really should be separate FAQs for each group and
an uberFAQ for the hierarchy. Thus, I'm soliciting volunteers for each
group and the uberFAQ).

But what I'm going to segue into is some of the problems I encountered
in terms of FAQkeeping. One may amaze you; it still does me. I got a fair
number of complaints that the FAQ had too *much* information in it. The
FAQ was divided into the following separate posts:
1. Introduction to the hierarchy and FAQ
2. Glossary of Usenet terms (IMHO), some comics terms, and r.a.c. slang
3. FAQ proper
4. General Usenet and specific r.a.c. netiquette, with pointers to
news.announce.newusers
5. Introduction to Internet Resources (What's a URL, how to do Usenet/FTP/
Gopher/WWW by email, intro to terms like FTP, Gopher, WWW, IRC, MUSH/MUD
6. Index of comics resource topics
7-11 or so: Comics resources on the Internet, including URLs, mailing
lists, IRCs, etc. listed alphabetically by Subject.

All of these were clearly titled in the Subject:

Yes, parts 6-11 were big. But they were clearly described in Part 1,
and it seems obvious to me that one certainly doesn't have to read the
resources; just use it when you want to know what available for a
particular subject. But apparently I gave too much credit in terms of
people understanding that.

This also ties into the topic I'm replying to; not only newbies, but
people who've been on long enough to know better, would complain when
I responded to a question with "It's in the FAQ, found at yadda yadda".
"Why don't you just tell them the answer?" "Because that's the whole bloody
point of having a FAQ!"

At this point, I'm in rather serious burnout (partially due to the task
of maintaining the resources index, particularly since I tried to check
sites before listing them to make sure they weren't just copyright
violations), not just on maintaining a FAQ but on the whole FAQ concept.
Seems to me that the idiots are winning...[insert Spaf's farewell here]

tyg tyg@hq.ileaf.com

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