RTFM as it exists at the moment extracts FAQs from the Usenet stream, and
the server at FAQs.org uses the RTFM archive to build a HTML-ized
searchable version.
The entire Usenet "system" assumed reasonably well behaved users, while
some posters will now use strong measures to splatter their commercial or
political messages wherever they can place them. Thus the complaints about
the amount of time deleting "bogus" messages at RTFM.
The Web is often a more approachable way to distribute information in this
day and age. Many internet accounts allow the user to put up an FAQ on
their page, tools are provided to assist in writing a web page, and there
are many "Free" sites like tripod and Geocities that will host a web site
in exchange for embedded advertising. This is compared with posting to
news.answers which requires one to manipulates header lines that are
increasingly "locked out" by much current news software. The trick is that
someone looking for the information may have difficulty finding it even
with a web search tool. 2006010 documents match the query "FAQ" in the alta
vista Canadian < http://www.altavista.ca/ > index, I did not try the world
index.
So perhaps we need/want a way where we can say to folks who are using the
net for the first time, or who have developed a interest in a topic "look
here". In My opinion, I doubt if we really need a dedicated site to SERVE
the FAQ files, although a few mirror sites making themselves available
would help spread the load. Perhaps an academic site like MIT might be
persuaded to offer server space to allow maintainers to avoid the more
commercial sites or being asked to pay "bandwidth" fees to their internet
supplier. What would be useful is a Yahoo style index where someone
(perhaps the same group who keeps RTFM on the straight and narrow, perhaps
a different group) would receive requests to list FAQ files, and put them
on an index at the "master site". The index would point to the "real" FAQ
and its Mirror if it exists, and the user who was seeking information would
download the file from that node. This relieves the Master site from
having to distribute all the information. This sounds in many ways like
the scheme that Martin mentioned. I tried to look at the URL's he gave, but
one did not respond, and the other one came up as a "blocked site" with the
web rating software here at work.
New users would be directed to the master site and be able to look in a
menu, and perhaps do a free-text search in the FAQ files that are
registered with the master site. The FAQ authors would be registered so
that links that break would be notified automatically, with perhaps a
mirror link being made available in case of ISP problems. Perhaps the
authors could even ask for some stats on how often their pages were
searched for.
The fly in this scheme is in deciding what is an FAQ? Once removed from
the Usenet matrix, will we have the "Chevrolet FAQ" from
http://www.chevrolet.com? Do we want this? (perhaps we do) the "rules' of
Usenet discourage it existing now. Will a university in say south Africa
consider it worthwhile to mirror that FAQ spread the load?
Like many of our discussions on this list, the real problems are perhaps
more social rather then technical.
Charles MacDonald - Information Management
<My own Opinion unless otherwise credited>
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