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[Mary Gardiner]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005, matthew.east at breathe.com wrote:
> My personal view on this the debate currently going on is about 
> terminology: the people who dislike Frequently Answered Questions pages 
> tend to advocate nonetheless a structure based around "Common Problems". To 
> some extent therefore IMO this is a semantic debate, at least in part.

It's a little more than that for me. The idea is reader's perspective
versus writer's perspective.

As a reader looking to play XYZ music files using Ubuntu, I don't give a
damn whether not being able to play them is a "common problem" or
"frequently asked question." All I care about is an answer to the
question. Therefore, I should *not* go to the front page of any
documentation tree and be asked to decide between "Common Problems" and
"Other hardcore stuff" at the top level. Asking me to choose between "I
want to play music", "I want to watch a video" and "I want to write an
email" as a first choice is more sensible: it's far more obvious to me
the reader which choice I make.

Now, from a writer's point of view, we do care about what are common
problems and what are one-off problems with some weirdo XYZ music format
from the dark ages because one of the ways we prioritise our writing
time and make our docs useful to the most number of people is by
answering the common questions.

And one side effect of this "useful to the most people thing" is making
sure that common problems are easy to find answers to. We can do that
by, for example, reducing the number of clicks required to get to
popular docs, or by ordering our menu pages based partly on having
common problems near the top. But the difference is we make the common
problem documentation easy to get to without ever requiring the user to
ask themself "is this a common problem?" Instead, they ask themselves
"is this a music problem?", go to the relevant page, and *just happen*
to find their problem up the top because it's common. They go through
the entire process without ever knowing that it's common, just that the
documentation for it was remarkable easy to find.

-Mary