RTFAQ?
Posted: Wed Oct 09, 2002 12:26 pm
Like many fora, this one seems to have trouble showing newbies the way the to finding answers for FAQs. While the posters have for the most part shown admirable willingness to answer these questions directly, it does mean that the forum ends up with many common and important issues addressed repeatedly in many, many threads.
There has to be a way to pool the Collected Wisdom of the Ages (mostly 16-25) so that newcomers can find answers readily. While there is a FAQL associated with this board (or rather, this board is associated with a pre-existing FAQL), many posters don't seem to know how to find it, and it is both dated (last update was 18 months ago) and relatively sparse. I don't know how busy DF is these days, but it certainly seems that the FAQL could use some revision (I'm not volunteering, myself - while I'd love to help, I barely have time to read the exiting posts, never mind work on LOIS or any other projects).
Another possible project could be to assemble a concordance or index of previous threads by topic(s), so that new readers could review previous postings for useful material. This would be a massive undertaking, far larger than a FAQ revision, but some of it could be automated with keyword recognition and so forth. Alternatively, a 'Best of' sticky thread could be made, with pointers to those postings which seem to offer definitive or well-stated answers to a particular issues; The TLP would contain the actual list, to be edited by the moderator, with the following posts being nominations for inclusion into the list. If that makes any sense at all...
While I'm at it, perhaps we could use a list of all the OS projects that are currently in progess, or at least all the ones which have their own hompages.
Does anyone have any other ideas to share?
There has to be a way to pool the Collected Wisdom of the Ages (mostly 16-25) so that newcomers can find answers readily. While there is a FAQL associated with this board (or rather, this board is associated with a pre-existing FAQL), many posters don't seem to know how to find it, and it is both dated (last update was 18 months ago) and relatively sparse. I don't know how busy DF is these days, but it certainly seems that the FAQL could use some revision (I'm not volunteering, myself - while I'd love to help, I barely have time to read the exiting posts, never mind work on LOIS or any other projects).
Another possible project could be to assemble a concordance or index of previous threads by topic(s), so that new readers could review previous postings for useful material. This would be a massive undertaking, far larger than a FAQ revision, but some of it could be automated with keyword recognition and so forth. Alternatively, a 'Best of' sticky thread could be made, with pointers to those postings which seem to offer definitive or well-stated answers to a particular issues; The TLP would contain the actual list, to be edited by the moderator, with the following posts being nominations for inclusion into the list. If that makes any sense at all...
While I'm at it, perhaps we could use a list of all the OS projects that are currently in progess, or at least all the ones which have their own hompages.
Does anyone have any other ideas to share?
