FAQ Updates

[Gary W. Swearingen]

linimon at lonesome.com (Mark Linimon) writes:

> On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 01:49:18PM -0400, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
>> I am occasionally tempted to write up a "top ten most frequently asked
>> questions on freebsd-questions" list.  
>
> Please do so!

I had exactly the opposite thought.  But if done, it could be a
section of the FAQ's introduction chapter, just referencing ten
entries in the other chapters, improving those entries as desire
permits.

> The problem is that the FAQ is trying to do to too many things.  I'm
> open to suggestions.

I see two problems: 1) Some people will always want it to do all those
things, and it's hard to stop them.  2) Most people don't want to
maintain the stuff and it's hard to start them.

There's no way to change this and it's best to just leave the
unessential FAQ to those who can't be discouraged from working on it
but to make a practice of marking rotten entries "BROKEN" and removing
rotten entries which seem unlikely to ever be of any use to anyone.

> Perhaps the technical questions really belong in a knowledge base or a
> wiki or some other resource.  Casting them into an SGML file is too high
> a barrier of entry for a lot of people, and with that high barrier, things
> do not tend to get updated, either.

Amen.  The FAQ would be better as part of a wiki where more people
would hack on it.  But that won't happen without someone willing to
devote a lot of time to maintaining the server and some moderators.
And if there was such a wiki, it would probably grow like Topsy, with
work on Docbook docs dropping real far real fast.  Maybe that's enough
reason to not have a wiki.  But I've long wished that the Docbook docs
be ditched after using their content to seed a wiki.  A small subset
of HTML is sufficient markup for anybody but book publishers, IMO.