Doug Way wrote:

Alright, I set up a link on the SqF Swiki front page for this FAQ/Mini-FAQ project, and included some content for discussion on the page. Feel free to add comments to the page. (Or just discuss here, and I'll try to summarize on the page.)

Hopefully, this may get the ball rolling for a few other projects which could be listed on the Swiki. (Although I don't think it's worth creating a project page unless someone has volunteered to be the organizer for the project... the last thing we need is a bunch of orphaned project pages.)

I think it would be a good idea to have a "Volunteers wanted" page, where proposed projects are listed. I think I remember seeing a number of posts saying smthg like "I'm ready to help as soon as there's something to do". Such a centralized page should make it easy to match volunteers to projects, rather than having to search through the list archive. As soon as someone starts on one of these projects, he removes it from the "Volunteers wanted" page and creates a page dedicated to that project.

What do you think?

Thanks for your input. (Sorry for not responding earlier, but I'm in the middle of a vacation and checking my email infrequently...)

I generally agree with your points. This would split FAQ maintainance into a couple of categories... 1. maintaining the mini-FAQ and posting it to the list regularly, and 2. maintaining (and possibly refactoring) the full-size FAQ on the Swiki.

The mini-FAQ would mostly be brief answers with pointers to more information, and also organizational questions and answers. The full-size Swiki FAQ would have more detail, as it is now (although it is probably in need of some reorganizing).

So anyway, for now I'll plan on just working on the mini-FAQ. I'm not going to volunteer to maintain/refactor the full-size FAQ on the Swiki, as that could be a considerable effort, but if anyone else would like to volunteer to help with that (or the mini-FAQ), that would be great.

If maintaining two different types of FAQs turns out to cause confusion or be a problem, they could be merged at a later time. (One possibility would be to include all the questions but not the answers from the full-size FAQ in the mini-FAQ.)

I'll update the SqF Swiki with this info.

- Doug Way dway@riskmetrics.com

On Sun, 10 Jun 2001 18:37:00 +0200 Joern.Eyrich@brokat.com (Jörn Eyrich) wrote:

Doug Way wrote:

...

Alright, I set up a link on the SqF Swiki front page for this FAQ/Mini-FAQ

project, and included some content for discussion on the page. Feel free to add comments to the page. (Or just discuss here, and I'll try to summarize on the page.)

Your discussion points:

• Should the thing posted monthly to the Squeak list be a Mini-FAQ or

a regular full-size FAQ? I think it should be only a small FAQ.

• Should the monthly post include answers in the text of the post, or

links to answers? the mini faq should have answers, where I think that most of the questions will be of the kind "where do I find out more about...", so most of the answers are in essence pointers. Actually, the posting could just be "The FAQ is at http:/whatever".

• ... automatically copy the current Squeak FAQ from the Squeak Swiki

and post that monthly. ... well, that could work if minnow is up at the moment the script runs...

I think the main work is just to skim the FAQ regularly and see if it is still correct. And that could just as easily been done on minnow. Another task maybe to "refactor" the FAQ, making sure related things are near each other, that newbies easily find answers to their essential questions without drowning in advanced topics (e.g. looking for "how do I get it to run", but only finding things like "what does this obscure BitBlt mode do"....)

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