Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 01/16/72 11:48

Stewart Gordon <smjg_1998@yahoo.com> scripsit:

> This thread is about wikis, rather than FAQs....

Well, this is Usenet. You ask a question, we write something related or
unrelated. If it happens to answer your question, that's coincidental.

FAQs would be important if they were real FAQs with right answers. There
days, people don't read instructions, still less manuals. When they
encounter a problem, they want problem-oriented information - and a list of
frequently asked questions with correct answers, preferable organized in
some user-friendly structure and a search function, is what people would
like to use and would benefit from.

Whatever you mean by wiki (some people think wiki is an encyclopedia, some
think it's a discussion forum, etc.), it's something different. But since
you mentioned the AllMyFAQs wiki, it was natural to expect that you had a
FAQ-like wiki, or even a FAQ implemented as a wiki, in your mind. Such an
approach sounds easy but it doesn't produce a real FAQ.

> OK, so it might have some of the essence of a FAQ. But it could just
> as well double as a FFTAQ (frequently forgotten-to-ask questions).

It would undoubtedly become that too - just as many "FAQ pages" or even "FAQ
sections" on web pages are just collections of biased answers to questions
that the site owner would like his visitors to ask. Why would anyone read an
FFTAQ? If you know you need to _study_ things, you read a tutorial, or a
manual, or a book.

>> Building yet another one would probably result in something
>> that becomes almost as good as some of the current dusty FAQs before
>> you lose interest in it.
>
> That's true of privately maintained FAQs.

I have even less faith on unmaintained FAQs, which is what a wiki FAQ would
be as far as you follow the original wiki principle "anyone can modify at
will".

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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