Various Replies

[Penny & Bryce]

Hi all --

Heidi -- I can't delete the upenn address for some reason.  There's no 
"remove" box to check next to that one -- only N/A.

Cindy agreed to take Mysteries & help later on Sirius if needed:

> 
> Hmmm. I figured Mysteries would be a really big job, since many
> people love to discuss Mysteries.  Maybe it won't be so bad.  But
> there are probably a *lot* of Mysteries, so maybe there ought to be
> a three-person team dividing that one up.  Thoughts? 

I think that would be advisable -- not necessarily for writing the FAQ 
but for researching the mysteries & inconsistencies to include.  I found 
it very hard to research mysteries because .... what precisely to you 
enter into the search engine to pick up on these threads?  I do have a 
list of posts that I was keeping from April - early August on the 
Mysteries FAQ; at that time, I believe I relinquished control of that 
one to Joywitch (who may or may not have anything from early August to 
date to help you out).

Let me back up for all the new FAQ'ers with a bit of history.  When we 
switched over to egroups in Aug 2000, a group of us decided that we had 
7500 messages & even with the new egroups search facility (which hadn't 
existed *at all* in the Yahoo Club era), people still couldn't find old 
discussions too easily.  We decided to do essays summarizing the basic 
facts & all the theories, questions, commentary, etc. relating to a 
given topic.  We generated a topics list & then formed a group of people 
to go through groups of messages (300 messages per group), entering the 
message #s of interest into a database next to each topic to which the 
post related (did that make sense).  So, for the first 7500 messages, 
there is a database in this group that has "Snape: message #s 3, 5, 11, 
23, 55, 56, 57, 58 and so on."  Starting with message #1 on egroups (now 
our current Yahoogroups), we were supposed to just start keeping track 
of messages relating to FAQs we were working on.  My method currently is 
to move a message of interest to one of my FAQs into a sub-folder of my 
inbox.


> 1.  Should the FAQ be comprehensive?  In other words, are we looking
> for the best discussions of the character/issue/concept, or are we
> trying to list *every* discussion of the issue?

I think that's a bit subjective.  On one hand, we don't want these 
things to just be a string of summarized messages; we want there to be 
some degree of selectivity so that we have a reasonable-sized essay that 
flows & hangs together internally.  But, on the other hand, you do have 
to try & at least mention *all* the theories, at least in passing, to be 
fair to all the people who've posted their thoughts.  As far as message 
#s go though, I think it makes sense to include the most comprehensive 
well-written posts (though that's a subjective judgment of course).  I 
think this is esp. true if we're going to have coders linking directly 
to the messages -- you don't want to have too much work for the techies. 
  In that vein, I'll have to trim out some of my message citations 
probably, esp. in the Romance Pairings where I tended to just list out 
most all messages that had much of anything to say.

Speaking of which, in terms of formatting -- my Hermione FAQ has 
footnotes where the message(s) cited relate directly to the proposition 
footnoted.  In contrast, I found with the Romance Pairings FAQ that 
virtually every message relates to more than one proposition, so I just 
lumped all the messages of interest at the end of the FAQ in 
chronological order.  So, in other words, if you're looking for 
H/H-centric posts, you can't tell which ones fit that bill from the way 
I've done that one.  Most times, the R/H-centric posts tend to be 
anti-H/H &/or pro-H/G, so it became confusing to figure out where to 
place them.  So, I think the FAQ can determine the citation style used.

 
> 
> 2.  Is every post going to have a hyper-link, and if so, should we
> try to include a smaller number of post citations to avoid wearing
> out the techie types who will do this coding work?  Or should we
> indicate which posts are sufficiently awe-inspiring to be linked,
> where others would not be linked?

I like the latter actually -- that way if someone wanted to see 
*everything* they could do so, they'd just have to work harder.

> 
> 3.  Should the FAQs be balanced?  In other words, would the anti-
> and pro-vampire crowd gets about the same amount of discussion?  Or
> does the "majority" viewpoint on an issue get more air time?  Or do
> we not care about this?

Ooh, I definitely think you have to give equal air-time to both sides of 
any issue with clearly-defined camps of thought.  I figured I'd be 
roasted over an open flame if I didn't include plenty of pro-R/H, 
pro-H/G, etc. discussion in the Romance FAQ.  <g>  As is, I do still get 
an occasional off-list complaint.

> 
> 4.  Should we focus on more recent posts?  In other words, if I have
> 20 great Pettigrew's wand posts spread out over 2 years, should I be
> listing them all, or focusing on the more recent ones on the theory
> that older posts will soon be archived and inaccessible?

The older posts won't be inaccessible -- they'll just be in separate 
Archive groups.  I don't think we should leave out the older ones just 
based on age.

> 5.  Should we pay any attention to the author of the post?  In other
> words, should we try to cite a post *not* written by a Mod/Elf/Geist
> if it is equally good as one written by a Mod/Elf/Geist, to avoid
> having the FAQs look too "clubby"? 

If they are both equally good posts, I'd use them both.  But, yes, I 
don't think we want the FAQs to look "clubby" at all.

I'll create a database later that lists out who has agreed to what & 
includes people who've offered to help in general or with techie things 
specifically.

Penny