From: pschleck@cwis.unomaha.edu (Paul W Schleck KD3FU)
Subject: Re: FAQ - do you prefer the long form or the short form
Organization: University of Nebraska at Omaha
Distribution: na
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 17:39:45 GMT

brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) writes:

>In article <1c0m#zp.mont@netcom.com> mont@netcom.com (Mont Pierce) writes:
>>No.  According to on[sic] of the FAQ coordinators (I don't remember his name)
>>Brian has been doing this for some time even though they asked him not to.

>Nope, I've done it exactly twice in the last two years.  None before that.

Fortunately, Brian realizes that my words have been distorted in this
second-hand context.  What I really said was that the disagreement has
been going on for a while.

[...]

>But it's not a feud, as we're discussing it privately. The poll
>has, in general, met with a great deal of apathy.  The dozen or so
>responses I've received don't seem to indicate a great preference one
>way or another.  I've no intention of continuing to post the FAQ; I'm
>just trying to convince the people who ARE posting it to change the way
>they do it a bit.

I am a reluctant party in this debate, as I am only an FAQ contributor
and co-editor and not the formatter/poster.  I was really hoping that
Ian Kluft would step in and make some sort of statement about the
technical justifications for the format (and the size requirements of
his posting site).  Since he hasn't, I'm sort of left holding the bag,
unable to discuss aspects of FAQ maintenance I am not in a position
to comment about.

>Understand this: the info-hams mailing list and its associated newsgroups
>(fa.info-hams, later net.ham-radio, now rec.radio.amateur.misc) have
>been around a long time - the mailing list, for more than a decade.
>When this 'FAQ' stuff started getting rolling a few years back, a few
>newcomers to the net thought it would be a good idea, and began
>assembling the postings.  Not a bad idea.

Hmm, this "newcomers" thing again.  I guess I will take it as a
compliment :-).  I've been on the net about 2 years, which in Usenet/Dog
years is about 50.

>[The idea of a FAQ is to answer frequently asked questions.  It's not
>supposed to be a general factotum; it's counterproductive when the size
>and frequency of the FAQ posting exceed the bandwidth of the questions
>it's supposedly replacing.  We could SEPARATELY debate whether that
>point has yet been reached or not.]

As is, the FAQ's are already a condensed body of information that 
represents the questions that are likely to be asked sometime in the next
month.  Most of the additional lengthy reference material is already
relegated to FTP archives.  On the Usenet side of things there are kill
files, on the Info-Hams side of things there are gateway filters. 
There's also the problem about news sites causing FAQ's to be killed
prematurely (despite their Expires: headers).

It's entirely plausible that when you count up the number of FAQ's, and
attempted multiple answers (not all of them correct) posted to the net
each month, it probably equals or exceeds the bandwidth of two FAQ
postings.  There are also other justifications for FAQ's beyond
bandwidth requirments, including a) saving of work in answering them
individually b) answering them with well-researched consensus answers
and c) making this newsgroup a bit more user-friendly.  But I do agree,
this is a separate issue.

A complete discussion of the technical requirements of both the net and
the originating FAQ site are probably required before we can make any
final judgements on this issue.  Ian, where are you?

73, Paul W. Schleck, KD3FU

pschleck@unomaha.edu