FAQ Engine

[Lucifer]

http://www.phpmyfaq.de/

Is it worthwhile to pull the FAQ out of the wiki? Personally, I think it would be a good idea, but what do you guys think? (I'd look at hacking it right away to support the wiki user database, or something, so we don't have to incur yet another login)

[Z-Man]

My ten second gut feeling tells me this would be overkill. Unless it has a user magnet that makes people actually read the FAQ, what's the substantial benefit?

[Lucifer]

Here's an example of one in production:

http://www.austincc.edu/answers/index.php?action=show

(That's for my school )

The main advantage is organization, I think. We already have community editing of the FAQ, right? Also, people can post new questions and they can be answered, and we can actually measure what the most frequently asked questions are, a feature without which no faq engine can call itself an faq engine.

Anyway, the advantage to organization, besides organizing the FAQ's themselves, is that you can post comments to the questions, similar to how you can post to the php manual. So people who have alternate answers, or just plain more information, can post without changing the answer itself. So when a question has more than one good answer, or useful workarounds that people have discovered, all the information can be included.

The real question, as far as I'm concerned, is will people use it? We'll still have to direct newcomers to read it, there's no way around it. Even prominently-posted FAQs get ignored (although I think they get read more than base documentation). There isn't any magical way to get people to read the FAQ without just refusing to offer any help until they do, because it's a human problem, not a tech problem. So, will people around here watch it and post answers, comments, etc? If they don't, it's more work for us to deal with than the existing wiki page. If they do, it's probably still more work for us because we'll be answering questions. But in the second case, it's better work because the information is being organized and made useful for more people than it otherwise would be.

Edit: Oh yeah, the rss feeds are neat too. We can pick up the RSS feeds on our other sites so that people who are going to those sites because they have a frequently asked question might actually see the question they're asking, click it, and read the answer. For the top 5-10 questions people ask, they'll stop posting here entirely and bitching about not being able to use the search feature on anything.

[Jonathan]

Exactly what I was thinking. The wiki should be sufficient until someone gets addicted to writing FAQs all day (reality is far from it).

Edit: didn't see Lucifer's reply yet.