FAQ
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- For frequently asked questions about Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:FAQ
FAQ is an abbreviation for "Frequently Asked Question(s)". The term refers to listed questions and answers, all supposed to be frequently asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. Since the acronym originated in textual media, its pronunciation varies; both "fak" and "F.A.Q." are commonly heard (and therefore, when used with an indefinite article, it is either "a FAQ" or "an FAQ"). Depending on usage, the term may refer specifically to a single frequently-asked question, or to an assembled list of many questions and their answers. An alternative suggestion is that FAQ is actually a clumsily-constructed three letter acronym purported to have come from computer IT specialists, frustrated with answering over and over again the same, perceived stupid questions from computer users, and which secretly stands for the pronunciation "fah-queue". For example: "Please read the FAQ list to ensure your question has not already been answered before bothering the overworked IT department".
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[edit] Origins
While the name may be recent, the FAQ format itself is quite old. For instance, Matthew Hopkins wrote The Discovery of Witches in 1647 in FAQ format. He introduces it as "Certaine Queries answered," ... Many old catechisms are in a question and answer format. The newspaper "help" columns of "Ann Landers" and "Dear Abby" can be considered in the style of the Q&A format.
The FAQ is an Internet textual tradition originating from a combination of mailing list-laziness plus speculation and a separate technical and political need within NASA in the early 1980s. The first FAQ developed over several pre-Web years starting from 1982 when storage was expensive. On the SPACE mailing list, the presumption was that new users would ftp archived past messages. In practice, this never happened. Instead, the dynamic on mailing lists was for users to speculate rather than use very basic original sources (contacting NASA which was not part of ARPA and had only one site on the ARPANET) to get simple answers. Repeating the "right" answers becomes tedious. A series of different measures from regularly posted messages to netlib-like query mailing daemons were set up by loosely affiliated groups of computer system administrators. Posting frequency started annually by Eugene Miya, then monthly, and finally weekly and daily across a variety of mailing lists and newsgroups. The first person to post a weekly FAQ was Jef Poskanzer to the Usenet net.graphics/comp.graphics newsgroups. Eugene Miya experimented with the first daily FAQ. The first FAQ were initially attacked by some mailing list users for being repetitive.
On Usenet, Mark Horton started a series of "Periodic Posts" (PP) which attempted to answer trivia terminology such as "What is 'foobar'?" with appropriate answer. Periodic summary messages posted to Usenet newsgroups attempted to reduce the continual reposting of the same basic questions and associated wrong answers. On Usenet, posting questions which are covered in a group's FAQ is often considered poor netiquette, as it shows that the poster has not done the expected background reading before asking others to provide answers. Some groups may have multiple FAQ on related topics, or even two or more competing FAQ explaining a topic from different points of view.
Another factor on early ARPANET mailing lists was netiquette, wherein people asking questions typically "promised to 'summarize' received answers." Rarely were these summaries more than mere concatenations of received electronic replies with little to no quality checking.
[edit] Modern Developments
Originally the term FAQ referred to the Frequently Asked Question itself, and the compilation of questions and answers was known as a FAQ list or some similar expression. Today "FAQ" is more frequently used to refer to the list, and a text consisting of questions and their answers is often called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked (if asked at all). This is done to capitalize on the fact that the concept of a FAQ has become fairly familiar online - documents of this kind are sometimes called FAAQs (Frequently Asked and Anticipated Questions).
In some cases informative documents not in the traditional FAQ style have also been called FAQs, videogame FAQs in particular. A number of online repositories of videogame FAQs have emerged in recent years (such as CheatCodes.com and GameFAQs), where most so-called "FAQs" have nothing in common with the meaning of the name, but are often instead rather detailed descriptions of gameplay, including tips, secrets, and beginning-to-end guidance. Rarely are videogame FAQs in a question-and-answer format, although they may contain a short section of questions and answers in this format. In recent developments, there are even FAQs about everything from cooking to meeting women in bars. [1]
Over time, the accumulated FAQ across all USENET news groups sparked the creation of the "*.answers" moderated newsgroups such as comp.answers, misc.answers, sci.answers, etc. for crossposting and collecting FAQ across respective comp.*, misc.*, sci.* newsgroups.
The term "FAQ", and the idea behind it, has spread offline as well, even to areas not related to the Net at all. Even bottles of bicycle chain lubricant have been marketed with accompanying leaflets titled as a "FAQ".
There are thousands of FAQs available on many subjects. Several sites catalog them and provide search capabilities—for example, the Internet FAQ Consortium.
In the WWW, FAQ nowadays tend to be stored in content management systems (CMS), or in simple text files. Since 1998, a high number of specialized software has emerged, mostly written in Perl or PHP. Some of them are integrated in more complex software applications, others, like phpMyFAQ can be both run as a stand-alone-FAQ and integrated into web applications.
[edit] Trivia
The Dilbert comic strip has a recurring theme that reinforces the perception that often FAQs are not truly "frequently" asked questions via parody. Dogbert intentionally writes FAQs to be as obscure and useless as possible. Many corporate websites can be seen as the source for this gag, since some of their FAQs are nearly as obscure and far from a regular user's mind as the Dogbert versions are. Usability experts Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug (in Don't Make Me Think) have mentioned this in their writings, that too often these FAQs are written from an internal vantage point in place of putting true thought into the user's perspective and what information typical users may want and need.
