I feel the need to make a couple of points here:-
a mailing list for newcomers and other learners to ask questions is a good thing so long as enough people already knowledgeable and able to spend time helping actually take part. A mailing list is not a good place to look for answers to questions previously asked, for when a user feels a little more confident and wants to do some research themself. I'm not much of a fan of web-based forae because of the fragmentation they seem to engender BUT they are an excellent mechanism to provide an easily growable knowledge base of answers and advice. A swiki should be at least as good but they do seem to get horribly disorganised very quickly so perhaps using a web forum in the style of www.osxfaq.com's would be useful. Some threads are open to post questions and some are closed as a record of an answer that should stand alone.
more importantly we need *content*. I'd bet that almost every plausible newcomer question has been asked and answered but we have no sensible record. Searching a mailing list archive isn't really very helpful, especially if the subject was contentious and generated more heat than light. There are almost certainly hundreds of useful tutorial snippets - some much more than snippets - lying around the web. Surely an effective tactic would be to dig them all out, review them for accuracy, contemporary relevance, completeness and quality and then try to build a reasonably coherent body of guidance out of them?
more important still, we need *commitment* to do this and keep it up to date and answer questions and take the the answers and make them into newer or better tutorials and articles. We need people that are competent (or great!) teachers to actually decide to make the effort and to keep it up. We need people that are good at turning helpful answers into helpful pages on the web. We need reviewers to critique the tutorials and help make them better.
I can't provide that commitment since I'm pretty much maxed out by VMMaker and the general Foundation work. Who can volunteer to do this?
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh..