Talk:FAQ

• • • Being "FAQ" the acronym for "Frequent Asked Questions", wouldn't it be smarter and more sincere to just collect those questions instead of setting them up artificially? How can it be that it is those who have the answer who put the questions? Faq becomes then redundant with How To, or with any other Pedagogical or Help instrument. LET QUESTIONS BE GENUINE!

John,

Questions need to be genuine, agree 100%. The key issue though is where should the questions be asked. I would suggest the forum is still the best place for asking questions and getting an answer, though it can be done with no problems on the wiki - it is just likely that they will not be as quickly responded to as on the forums.

What was happening (when I had some time and some others had time) was that quesions asked in the forum which were answered were then being transferred to the wiki as a repository for users - cutting out the guff and getting to the guts. In this way it became more of a document repository.

It has been a while since I have posted in the forums requesting others who have had their questions answered to transfer the question and answer to the wiki. Perhaps need to do it again.

While there is a cross over between "How To" and "FAQ" I would also differentiate them by :- I am having a problem - Go to "FAQ" whereas "I want to do something/change something" - Go to "How To". Might just be how my mind works. Links within any wiki can obviously be numerous and I would expect they will cross over between the two to save duplication (I Hope). There should also be links from questions/how to's to the documentation for the user , administrator and developer.

At this time John we are getting about 2,500 unique visitors each month moving about 0.75 GB of data per month. I would image that the forum is getting a far greater hit rate than this. So I am just thinking; Do you want to move some activity from the forums to the wiki? - (this is not a problem) or is it simply the structure you are concerned about?

BTW - all the best and my ongoing thanks for your efforts.

--Laurie Lewis 03:46, 11 October 2006 (CDT)

Not sure if this page is needed if people use the FAQ category. --Nathanhaigh 02:22, 8 October 2007 (EST)

How do we navigate around the various topics?? --Laurie Lewis

The FAQ category should be sub categorised, and each FAQ page should be categories accordingly. The simply link a generic FAQ page to the FAQ categories page - the articles are then automatically sorted appropriately for navigation. --Nath 21:49, 27 October 2007 (EST)

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Nath,

Thats Ok if you assign the FAQ page to a category, hopefully the correct category, when you create it. If not it then it will get lost unless you do a search or some other diligent person assigns it to a category. Whilst I can see the quite clear logic in what you say it assumes that a knowledge of mediawiki exists and that users will automatically categorise. I have had to do quite a bit of this since it started and it can become time consuming checking everything. Other side to the argument is that the FAQ area is not growing very much at all so not a lot of work initially to categorise all the pages.--Laurie Lewis 22:51, 27 October 2007 (EST)