|
To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup.
See rationale on the talk page, or replace this tag with a more specific message. Editing help is available.
(Tagged August 2005) - 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. It has been suggested that Apocopation be merged into this article or section. ...
Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations formed from the initial letter or letters of words, such as NATO and XHTML, and are pronounced in a way that is distinct from the full pronunciation of what the letters stand for. ...
Pronunciation refers to: the way a word or a language is usually spoken; the manner in which someone utters a word. ...
Origins
While the name may be recent, the 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. [[Image:Matthewhopkins. ...
Codex Manesse, fol. ...
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 FAQs 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 FAQs. The first FAQs were initially attacked by some mailing list users for being repetitive. The abbreviation FTP can refer to: The File Transfer Protocol used on the Internet. ...
Netlib, www. ...
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 {yet another 'A'}. 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 FAQs on related topics, or even two or more competing FAQs explaining a topic from different points of view. Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ...
Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ...
A newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users at different locations. ...
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.
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. One large collection of such documents is GameFAQs, where most so-called "FAQs" have nothing in common with the meaning of the name, other than containing a FAQ (and even then, they may not be frequent, or even asked, questions). GameFAQs main page in September 2004. ...
Over time, the accumulated FAQs 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 FAQs across respective comp.*, misc.*, sci.* newsgroups. Crossposting is the act of posting verbatim copies of one message on multiple message centers, without customising each copy to suit the audience or forum. ...
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, FAQs 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. Graphic representation of the world wide web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). ...
A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. ...
Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below) is an interpreted procedural programming language designed by Larry Wall. ...
PHP, short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is an open-source, reflective programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content, and more recently, a broader range of software applications. ...
- See also: fact sheet, FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (a movie)
A fact sheet is a presentation of data on any subject in a format emphasizing brevity, key points of interest or concern, a fairly minimalist design aesthetic, and a general desire to convey the most relevant information in the least amount of space. ...
External links |
Feeds |
Contact