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Re: [faq-maintainers] Close up shop?

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On Tue 24 Apr, Henk P. Penning wrote:
>
> -- to keep up quality, it is necessary to be able to declare
> a faq 'dead'. For this you need a simple rule, otherwise the
> discussions will be endless. The rule should NOT involve
> contents of the faq (not simple). An ageing rule is the only
> one I can think of.

Agreed, but I think the mechanism needs to be a bit more than "delete
an unchanged FAQ after 'n' months". This would require FAQ maintainers
to make trivial changes to their FAQs at frequent intervals, and I
would not be at all surprised to find that someone decided to write an
autoposter which dodged this rule (e.g. by incrementing the version
number at every posting).

One possible mechanism would be to act on any replies received to the
"warning" message. For example:

1. If a FAQ is unchanged after 12 months, email the maintainer of that
   FAQ to ask if it should be retained.

2. If the FAQ maintainer replies "no", delete the FAQ immediately.

3. If the FAQ maintainer replies with any answer other than "no", mark
   the FAQ as still current (i.e. wait another 12 months).

4. If there is no answer (or if the only answer takes the form of an
   out-of-office autoreply), wait 1 month and ask again. If no reply
   has been received after (say) 6 months of trying, delete the FAQ
   (always assuming that the FAQ has not changed in the interim).

On a not-entirely-unrelated point, is there any mileage in splitting
FAQs into "current" and "historic" categories? I'm thinking of the
"historic RFC" as an analogy, in that the information may be of some
use to certain people provided they are fully aware that it is no
longer current. Just a thought...

-- 
S L Painting <postmaster@zedtoo.demon.co.uk>
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