FAQ page
origin of the FAQ: if there is a structure, look up the relevant section. Without a structure, make a FAQ
The Frequently Asked Questions method was invented for traditional forums (newsgroups, mailing lists, web forum) that are usually a big pile of unstructured collection, with extremely bad noise level.
Noise sources:
- duplication is noise
- outdated information is noise
- question that is repeated later, when answered at another place is noise
Unfortunately traditional forums noise level does not converge to a reasonable value (like 60% noise, 40% useful info is a very good noise level, you only need to read 2.5 times more than ideally), but noise level converges to 100%, which means the effective information content of the archive is converging to 0% in the long run (3..7% is typical value after a few years: you need to read 15..30 times more than ideally. Look up a yahoo forum and make an abstract of it and you will see ).
Those forums need some methods to avoid repeating the same question repeating the same question repeating the same question repeating the same question repeating the same question repeating the same question repeating the same question repeating the same question:
- structured doc with the collected information: one person maintains it, or maintained via WIKI or SubVersionSvn
- FAQ that answers some frequent questions, usually points to the doc. If the doc is structured well, and available to people, the FAQ should be very short (otherwise it could duplicate the whole doc, right?).
I think
- the links on the top of the page should answer most of the generic questions
- a question (and/or answer) always relates to a subtopic, so it should be on the relevant page (good names in SiteIndex help a lot so one can find the keyword)
If you know a question which does not relate to a subtopic (no page for it in SiteIndex) why not make a page for it linked from the page with the closest topic?
If you are inconfident if it requires a page, or cannot find a good name for it, write to your memberspage, or a subpage of it, see MembersPage. Alternatively, write here:
Q: Where should I ask the question ?
A: Try on the relevant page if possible. Your page, made from MembersPage otherwise. At a last chance, whereever you can :-)
Q: Has anyone used VEMS with the [Rover K-series] engine?
A: It seems like a very standard install, followup on MembersPage/JoeStroller