On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 15:06 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
> > What would really be nice would be some volunteer editors to collate
> > useful answers from both the mail list and forums into the wiki and
> > respond to repeat questions with links to the right places. Neither
> > forums nor mail list archives work very well as historical knowledge
> > bases even though the answer you want might be in there somewhere.
>
> A FAQ maintainer? They had on LFS and it worked pretty well.
Sort of... FAQs tend to be outdated and stale, and mail lists/forums
tend to have too much clutter. I'd shoot for something in between
where a fairly large number of people could work to update new
information on a wiki and index it for reference by others.
> The only
> drawback was the same that makes current vehicles less useful: as some
> folks won't search archives, others won't search a FAQ, some won't check
> the forum(s).
That's the 2nd part: the people who know where things are on the
wiki need to respond to new questions with links as well as updating
them with new info from other reponses.
> Then the FAQ maintainer issues the refrain from that old song "Please
> Mr. Custer (I don't wanna go)", "What am I doing here?" and moves on.
If people don't use a FAQ there's probably a good reason. Doing it
right is a lot more than a one man job. And at some point, weeding
out old information about issues that no longer apply becomes an even
harder problem. You don't need real expertise yourself to copy
someone else's solution into a wiki, but you often do to know when
it becomes outdated.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
