# I started here at OSU's CIS department a little over a month ago now.
# I'm a maintainer of a couple FAQ's myself, and one of my desires is to
# re-vamp the FAQ archive here. The original guy, Tom Fine, is long gone,
# off to another department here. In the past we had a student sorta
# keep things running and write up some documentation on how the thing
# actually works. :-) However, that student has since left.
That has been the problem in the past at a couple places, the students
left and the resources rotted. I am not just talking about the FAQ archives
here. This is a problem with using student resources in general as the
primary focus of a net.resource. Students graduate and if there is not
sufficient departmental support ...
# My questions to faq-maintainers is:
#
# - What changes would you like to see?
Have you taken a look at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ ?
# - Should the archive be primarily an archive of pointers to FAQs on the
# Web? (perhaps with local mirrors?) Or should it remain primarily an
# archive of Usenet FAQs? This is both a question of inclusiveness (what
# FAQs to include) and of architecture and content (what form should they
# be in, and is ASCII->HTML still as important as it was 3 years ago).
# If we choose to add Web-only FAQs, how should they be organized?
At present faqs.org is web based archive of the Usenet FAQs with hyperlinks
enabled. Currently we are adding the ability to view the archives in two
different ways, as the current hyperlinked documents and as set of pointers
to the original author web pages in the same fashion as faqfinder.
# - Should we again raise the issue of providing a single standard header
# that Usenet FAQs insert to indicate where to find the current Web version
# of the FAQ, and use that (exclusively?) in our archive?
Already done. The URL: auxiliary header does that today.
# - How to handle multi-part FAQs? Should this be a case-by-case basis?
# (some FAQs are broken into true "chapters", not just chopped up into parts).
# How should the decision be made?
Why decide? www.faqs.org provides both and let's the user decide. The only
determining factor is if the article is in a format that can be broken up
into logical section.
The intent of faqs.org is to provide a long term, supported FAQ archive
and to be advancing FAQ writting on the net. We probably need to talk
off-line but there may be things that we can do together that would be
of value to the FAQ maintainers and the net.community at large.
-- Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502 The Landfield Group FAX: 1-817-545-7650 Email: kent@landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/ Please send comp.sources.misc related mail to kent@uunet.uu.net. Search the Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/