Tom Neff wrote:
> Once again, the ancient divide between people who mulishly interpret
> "Frequently Asked Questions" to mean "answers to real questions that real
> people actually frequently ask," versus the folks who interpret it to mean
> "Stuff we want to tell you, whether you ever ask about it or not."
And besides the case, which Tom aptly satirizes, where the "stuff
we want to tell you" is extraneous metafluff, there's a deeper
issue here. Many (though of course not all) FAQ lists cover
topics which also have a body of formal literature associated
with them, or which people usually go to school to study before
they're even in a position to start asking questions. Yet these
topics still have Frequent questions -- it seems that just about
everyone, no matter which parts of the existing literature
they've been exposed to or which classes at which schools they've
taken, manages to have the same holes in their knowledge, holes
which begin to reveal themselves when the learner is in an open
discussion forum (such as a Usenet newsgroup!) where it's
possible to freely ask those nagging questions which the book and
the teacher didn't cover. And somehow, for any topic, there are
communal blind spots which *none* of the books or teachers ever
cover.
But given that these communal blind spots evidently exist, it
would be an act of considerable hubris for an FAQ list author to
presume that he was somehow immune. An FAQ list which is written
using a strategy of "Let's come up with a concise outline of all
the relevant points concerning this topic, and arrange them in
handy Q&A format" is all too likely to end up leaving its readers
with the very same holes and nagging questions that the books and
classes did, because this FAQ list development strategy is
obviously not significantly different, in terms of the material
it ends up covering, from the strategies used by all the other
authors and teachers out there, which are presumably variations
on the theme of "Let's come up with an outline of all the
relevant points concerning this topic, and arrange them in
{chapters in a book / lectures in a class}."
An FAQ list, on the other hand, that ignores what its maintainer
merely *thinks* are the important or useful points concerning a
topic, and instead slavishly answers just those questions which
real people persist in asking in one of those open forums, is
likely to be uniquely comprehensive and useful. It doesn't
matter that some of the questions have no rhyme or reason to
them, or are downright stupid, or are so obvious (to anyone who's
already an expert on the topic) that anybody else *ought* to be
able to answer them by consulting any of the available reference
books on the topic. If a question is Frequently asked, it's
fair game for an FAQ list, and contrariwise, if a hypothetical
question is *not* frequently asked, then no matter how true or
useful its purported answer is, it may well be extraneous,
unnecessary, or out of place in a true FAQ list.
A Usenet newsgroup or other open forum ends up being an extremely
effective tool for discovering just what the collective blind
spots in the existing body of knowledge on a topic are. That's
why Usenet FAQ lists became so well-known and successful (to the
point that the term "FAQ" is now applied to just about any piece
of reference material in Q&A format, no matter how contrived or
gratuitous its questions are).
Steve Summit
scs@eskimo.com
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