NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: FAQ Proposal
From: Dan Hogan
Date: 2003 Oct 2, 21:21 -0700
From: Dan Hogan
Date: 2003 Oct 2, 21:21 -0700
I'll sure out it on the web page. Cheers -Dan- On 2 Oct 2003 at 19:40, Dan Allen wrote: > One of the great things about this NAV-L mailing list is the cumulative > wisdom of its contributors. This wisdom is only partially presented in > the threads that have come and gone over the years which can be browsed > on a website somewhere. > > If we wrote a slick FAQ document, it would do two things for us: > > 1) help give quick answers to newcomers so that we don't have to > reinvent the wheel each time somebody asks a basic questions, > > and far more importantly, > > 2) it will help us gather our thoughts together and begin to give our > many threads some organization and structure. > > Here is a proposal to be considered by the group, a procedure for how > we as a group could produce an FAQ that would quickly becoming a > best-selling book! Well, to a modest audience, but it could be a real > addition to science if we did it right. > > STEP 1: gathering questions > Let's make a short list of one line questions. We could have everyone > mail a list of basic and intermediate navigation questions to somebody > (I volunteer), who could gather and categorize them and remove > duplicates. This would constitute a basic place to start. > > STEP 2: writing first pass answers to questions > The list gathered in step one could be sent to the group. If there are > questions that you think you could tackle, you would let me know and > you would write an answer to the question. > > STEP 3: critiquing answers > Once an answer is written, it could be posted to the group for critique > and comments. > > STEP 4: adding to the FAQ > Once it made it through step 3 it would be added to the FAQ. > > We could in fact attribute authorship to each question answered. > > Another thing we could do is choose or even vote and have whoever we > consider the resident expert on a particular topic write that answer, > or we could just let people submit answers, or perhaps we could have > several people submit several different answers to the same question > and then pick the best one for inclusion in The Document. > > Now in some sense we have already done this: just look at our thread > archive and you will see we have dealt with many questions and some of > them many times. It therefore stands to reason that someone with a lot > of time and a nice collection of the past many years of email could > cobble together an FAQ made of the conclusions of various questions > that have been raised over the years, but the problem is that multiple > authors for a given issue make a smooth narrative a rare event (a > notable exception is George's great series on lunars). > > Is all of this way too much process? Is this too much work? Is what I > am considering of any interest to the rest of you? Does anyone else > think this would be a good way to tackle the challenge of our bringing > together all of our various perspectives and knowledge to make a common > document? Is there a better way? > > I await your views. > > Dan Allen > 47?28.915' N, 121?47.850' W