(I'm keeping both newsgroups here, because the OP's topic was
appropriate for one newsgroup but these excerpts from C++ FAQ and
meta-discussion of that FAQ are appropriate for the other
newsgroup.)
From: red floyd <
[email protected]>
It was completely off-topic, which you would have known had you
read the FAQ first (as recommended), especially section 5:
http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/how-to-post.html
I have a little gripe with the current state of art in FAQ technology.
<
http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/how-to-post.html#faq-5.5>
Note #1: Please don't give them the location of the appropriate FAQ.
E.g., don't say, "Look at FAQ [10.3]" or "Look in section [10]". It's
the old give-them-a-fish vs. teach-them-to-fish problem.
Surely the technology exists whereby there could be a search engine
for each FAQ. The novice enters some search terms, or a natural
language question, and the engine finds one or more sections that
seem to match some of the search terms or keywords. This is similar
to what MicroSoft tries to do in some of their help systems in
software such as MicroSoft Word, although their implementation is
utter crap from my limited personal experience, such as when I
tried to ask it how to change some rather simple aspect of
formatting. IMO it's possible to do much better in the case where
there are only a hundred or so separate FAQ questions, and all it
has to do is find one of them (or more than one if it's not clear
which match is best). I offered to work on such a facility a few
years ago, but nobody showed any interest in being first-round
testers of anything I wrote, so without pay or testers I did other
stuff instead. But if anybody ever liked my idea, and I wasn't in
the middle of some major project, I might finally give it a shot.
A good librarian, confronted with a patron asking about some topic,
might take the patron directly to the particular section having
that topic. Or the librarian might show the patron how to search
for that topic in the online catalog. Only a very poor librarian
would simply say "it's in the stack, go look for it yourself".
Likewise, a good newsgroup helper might tell the newbie which FAQ
section has that answer, or tell the newbie what keyword to search
for, or if a search engine (as I proposed) existed, the helper
might refer the newbie to the search engine. IMO it's rude for the
so-called helper to just say "It's in the FAQ, go find it
yourself", as recommended in item 5.5. I hereby request the
maintainer of that FAQ to amend that advice to at least have the
helper recommend the appropriate keywords to search for.
There's a difference between actually teaching somebody how to swim
or fish, and just tossing the person in or beside the lake without
any instruction *how* to swim or fish.
So anyway, does anybody like my idea for FAQ search engine? Google
has been taken for granted recently. No longer we tell people just
"it's out there on the net; if you randomly look at the whole net
you might eventually find it". Instead, we say "Google is your
friend" as a reminder how easy it is to find things via a search
engine, often easier than directly asking on a newsgroup. Or we
give an off-the-top-of-head answer, which is sorta wrong, but which
has the correct technical jargon, so the newcomer can then search
Google using that jargon to find the correct info, so the
sorta-wrong answer turned out to be very very useful.
