1. Authors aren't updating faqs as often anymore.
While I have felt this was the case I did not have any justification
until someone I was talking to about this recently stated the obvious
"Why don't you check and arm yourself with real numbers ?" Hmmmm...
That made too much sense so I did. I generated these numbers on May 19th.
Of 3402 total faqs in the rtfm.mit.edu archive:
Year Percent of
# - Last Posted FAQs Per Year
34 1993 1%
10 1994 >1%
228 1995 7%
406 1996 12%
438 1997 13%
495 1998 15%
1791 1999 53%
What we are seeing is that 47% of all FAQs on rtfm.mit.edu and
www.faqs.org have not been updated in the last 6 months and 33%
have not been updated since 1997 or before.
That's pretty alarming as it shows a trend towards a decaying of the
process and real aging of the information made available through the
process. It would be nice to look at the number of new FAQs created
each year. If it exceeded the number abandoned then things really
wouldn't look quite so bleak but I can't get those numbers directly
from the archive.
The point is, there seems to be a lack of incentive for authors to
keep the information current and useful by updating their FAQs month
after month, year after year. As with most people, when your available
free time becomes nearly non-existance, the first thing dropped are
volunteer efforts.
2. FAQs are moving away from Usenet and more and more to the web.
I see three parts to this, first discussions on the list, second
the number of FAQs with URL auxiliary headers listed, and third
the number of requests I get per day to add FAQs to www.faqs.org
that have not gone through the news.answers process.
First, authors have time to time talked about how their FAQs are
getting too large to post to Usenet. The solution that we have
come up with is to have those authors post a "pointer" faq, one
that summarizes how someone can get to the complete information
on the web.
Second, of the 3402 FAQs checked, 1261 of them have URL auxiliary
headers that point to the FAQ's home page. While this is a good
thing to include due to the timeliness of updates on some archives,
it indicates a perception by the authors that the web is the
authoritative point for their FAQs.
Third, valuable FAQs are being developed daily and I am getting
quite a few requests daily to add FAQs to www.faqs.org. Many
of these are people that have no understanding of Usenet, the
news.answers newsgroup or the Usenet FAQ process. I am getting
10 to 15 requests per day for inclusion. To this point I have
not done so as the archive here was totally focused on Usenet FAQs.
3. Current process requires too much knowledge of Usenet and does not
allow for Internet based faqs.
Many people writing FAQ today are new to the Web but not new to the
content they are writing about. As mentioned I receive quite a few
requests to put their FAQs up on faqs.org. These people may know OF
Usenet but they don't know enough about it to go through the process.
In many cases the FAQs they are writing really span potential several
newsgroups. When you start talking about crossposting I can almost
"hear" their eyes glazing over like a deer caught in headlights.
Some of this may be my fault as admin for www.faqs.org because it
might have been possible for me to set up some sort of posting
wizards but that does not exist today...
4. Quality of FAQs that authors can produce is better on the web than
is currently the case on Usenet.
The text based nature of Usenet tends to get in the way of authors
that want to have FAQs with images and pictures. Some say "a picture
is worth a thousand words", but an ascii picture is is better depicted
with words. Many authors want to develop the most complete FAQ possible
and this type of restriction tends to leave authors leaning towards the
media that allows for the best presentation. Also, how many times have
we seen discussions about what "txt2html or html2txt" tools are available
to authors allowing them to maintain one copy of their FAQ instead of 2 ?
5. Usenet FAQ process has a great deal of overhead to get a new FAQ
approved that has little to do with content approval
The process of approving FAQs has been extremely time consuming for the
moderators of the news.answers newsgroup. There has been times when only
one person is actually carrying the load. That was not the way it was
intended. It was seen as a job for a team of active moderators working
together. While that may be the case at times, it has not always been
the norm. The moderators' job is a volunteer job and as such is subject
to the same whims of "real life time restrictions" that authors face.
This is not a cheap shot at the moderators. They do a fabulous job!
But sometimes there is not enough of them and the approval process can
be a bit too manual when if fact it needn't be.
6. FAQ archives have been very transient in the past and not a reliable
resource at times due to the volunteer nature of the process.
As someone who has run archives for both FTP and Web based FAQs at
multiple companies, I know first hand how reliable FAQ archives are in
general. What we've see in the past is that FAQ archives within companies
usually become the pet project of one or two people. When they leave
the company, the archives go down hill or are removed completely. In
certain university environments, support for the FAQ archives has been
provided by students, students who leave the university at some point.
Unless the university really considers the FAQs a net.resource, the
local archive becomes an unsupported feature of some section of
diskspace. In either case the user and author community are not
well served by an out-of-date archive and no way to correct it.
Granted, there are real exceptions to this. MIT should be recognized
for their continued support of the FAQ process. They have done a nice
job of making sure rtfm.mit.edu was available to the moderators of the
*.answers newsgroups as well as the community at large. I'm not sure
who has been driving that support but if I did I'd thank them personally.
As someone who is footing the bill for www.faqs.org, I know first hand
that it takes a great deal of work to make this happen day after day.
It is amazing just how much work goes in behind the scenes. Since
this site is visible in many search engines, I get requests for faqs
to be emailed, for adding new FAQs, for replacing abandoned FAQs with
newer ones by different authors, as well as many natural language
questions as if I know it all. ;) "Where can I find out about getting
flat-coated blond retrievers that have champion bloodlines but cost
less than $500 for my 6 year old daughter ?"... All this takes time
and when the volunteers leave or have "real work" the archives and
the user community suffers.
7. Search engines are not linked into the FAQs automatically and require
the authors to do much of that themselves.
I'll be quite honest with everyone. I have been part of the problem
when it comes to becoming engrained into the search engines. I have
had the opportunity to do so but there was no way for me to pay for a
dedicated T3 and the systems to make it happen. I talked with a couple
different people at search engines that would have liked to put the
FAQs up as a searchable resource (an still do). Unless there was some
way to fund that link it just wasn't going to happen. And I just couldn't
convince the search engines to foot the bill... At the time advertising
was an absolute no-no on www.faqs.org due to author wishes which I honored.
That sort of tied my hands. There was no way to do it for some and not for
others... The reality is that we need to get in a situation where we are
directly tied to the search engines so our material does come up near the
very top of the search results.
8. Usenet FAQs are static in nature and do not allow for the timely
distribution of updates.
Because of the posting nature of news.answers, it is considered rude to
post your FAQ multiple times in a couple week period. FAQs that have to
be timely will normally find the web a better place because you can
update things as you need to. If you post the FAQ to Usenet immediately
after updating it is you will probably get flamed for trying to provide
the readership with timely information.... sigh...
9. Multiple authors on a single FAQ can be problematic.
Trying to share the load of maintaining an FAQ between multiple people
can be a problem. There are coordination issues, administrative issues
content issues and posting issues. All these force a model of a single
author/maintainer for the entire FAQ. This can cause a bottleneck if
multiple people are trying to provide regular updates to a maintainer
responsible for editing and posting the FAQ. If that person is busy,
even though the other authors have the time, the newer version is
delayed.
10. The way people are asking looking for answers is changing.
With the web, search engines rule as the way to find information. When
people are presented with the first page of 10 results with 20000 other
results, people become overwhelmed. Then they start looking for a human...
I have been getting an increasing number of email messages with simple
questions in them. It would be nice to be able to have a facility that
allowed me to directly build an FAQ from those submitted questions and
to be able to rank questions as what is the "top ten" questions in a
specific category. Then I would know where I should really spend my time
(both as an author and a site admin) doing a better job of answering the
questions.
Ok. I'm starting to ramble but the points are valid. And these are
not the only problems (but my fingers need a break ;) ).
Reality is we need to reexamine how it is we are dealing with the process
of providing answers to those asking the frequently asked questions. If we
don't we risk becoming another dinosaur of the net much in the same light
as comp.mail.maps. (When was the last time any of us rebuilt our pathalias
database to support our email configuration...)
-- Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502 Email: kent@landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/ Email: kent@nfr.net http://www.nfr.net/ Search the Usenet FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ Search the RFC/FYI/STD/BCP Archive at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/
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