Reposting: Venting & Suggestions

[Aberforth's Goat]

Same thing I said over in Mod-land.

* * * * * * * *

Penny wrote,

> Apparently some FAQ authors were able to code so that their
footnotes
> linked directly to message #s -- I'd sure *love* my FAQs to do
this.
> I'd also love to know *how* to update my FAQs.   <snip>

NB: <humor off> Since I originally ended up in this forum as a
FAQ-writer, this topic is important to me!

It's time to consider four major problems in our FAQ strategy.

Problem 1. Getting stuff online. Right now, this is *my* biggest
irritation. My last FAQ (a finished, coded piece on Pettigrew)
has spent *six months* parked in the FAQ-Group files. All it
needs is a few tweaks and an upload - if I had the passwords for
our space I could do that myself. (That is .. all it needed was
... etc. It's now had six months to go stale.)

Suggestion 1: Let's put the FAQs on a server *all* FAQ writers
can access. (Heck, Geocities would do the trick.) Quite a few of
us know how to put an html file together - certainly enough to
help out someone like Penny. Yes, this "open source" style
involves the possibility of botched links and bad html - but it
would also let anyone competent in html have a look through our
web and edit out the problems.


Problem 2. Personnel. We have quite a few people who can do
content - though many of them are up to their ears in other
projects & duties. We have hardly anyone who knows how to do
really good html - and those who can are already heavily
overloaded. (BTW, this is *not* my forte - I'm a FrontPage wimp.)
This seems odd, since the lists are *crawling* with webmasters.

Suggestion 2. It's time to revive the FAQ group and invite a few
competent webmasters to join it. We should also use that forum to
talk through our areas of content responsibility to see who is
responsible for what, who would like to help and who needs help.


Problem 3. Research methodology. Also, the people who can do
content are being forced to re-invent the wheel every time they
do archive research. There are some simple techniques that have
worked very well for me - and would also make collaborative
research much easier.

Suggestion 3. Once we have some active discussion going in the
FAQ group, let's talk this through. By using a standard Word
table (column 1: post#, column 2: topic discussed in post, column
3: further notes), it would be easy to assign, say a 5,000
message archive sector to a helper.


Problem 4. Responsibility. At the moment, no one seems to know
who is responsible for what - except for the few poor souls who
are supposed to be distilling ca. 50,000 posts into cleverly
written FAQs - all in the hopes that the things will end up
online.

Suggestion 4. Once we're up and talking over in FAQ-land, it
would be a good idea to divvy up responsibility between
HTML-wizards, CONTENT-geists (whether as authors or maintainers)
and RESEARCH-gouls. And <humor back on again> if we had a
fanatically devoted Grand Wizard slashing his whips at all the
minions in the project, it might help us keep things rolling!

Baaaaaa!

Aberforth's Goat (a.k.a. Mike Gray)
_______________________

"Of course, I'm not entirely sure he can read, so that
may not have been bravery...."




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