Re: Role of the FAQ trees

Hi John,

Perhaps it might be useful to explain the idea I had for the working draft faq.
Can be used any way one likes of course.

Idea is that the drafts go into the working draft faq at an early
stage. Then they are easy for anyone to find at any time, and to comment
on them, or see what stage they are at.

Reason for suggesting this is that drafts posted to the TL can easily get
lost because of the large number of messages, while if placed in the tree,
with the system of folders etc, will be much easier for anyone to find.

One may also be reluctant to keep posting a large faq to the TL each time one
chagnes it, while if it is in the working draft tree, everyone can see it,
and one just needs to say it has changed, and say what has changed.

The working draft tree is immediately up to date. Could save on
a lot of posting of multiple drafts to the TL, especially later, if this really
takes off and there is a lot of activity of that sort going on.

At the moment there are few enough drafts so that it is feasible to keep
re-posting them, but even then, if one wants to see the latest draft
on some topic, and has missed the day it was actually posted, could
take some searching to find it.

Also, one might plan quite a large addition to the faq with a number of
entries in it interlinked, and in that case, one could just post a note to
say it has been added to the faq tree for evryone to comment on. Maybe add
a new folder to the tree (say on periodicity blocks, or whatever), and all
the entries are in that folder.

I think also that the FAQ tree might be a way of making some of the interesting
posts to the TL from the past more easily available, perhaps edited to be
up to date by the original authors.

In that way it would be going beyond the idea of a newbies faq to
a kind of research resource, and a way of making some of the material
from the TL more accessible, not just to newbies, but to everyone.

One could then edit it to make a faq geared towards newbies,
which would be one of the roles of the FAQ keeper of course.

With my latest version of the program, it will also be possible to
edit it to make a custom faq with just the sections in it that
someone is particularly interested in, which they could then print
out.

It is just a suggestion, and one is welcome to use the trees
in whatever way one wants.

However, wanted to make sure the idea is clearly understood at any rate,
then one can decide whether this is the best way to use the trees,
or if some other approach is preferable.

I don't think I've expressed it clearly before, but hopefully this
does that now.

Rpobert