mutiple page FAQs November 30, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , trackbackI’m thinking about FAQ documents, and how to structure them when they
start to get large and unweildy. The use of wiki technology can allow
this to happen sooner than it used to.
The problem I first identified is to do with the trade-off between
individual page size and excessive navigation, which seemed at first like a web
development problem. But there’s also the knowledge related problem
of not wanting to set up overly rigid categories by defining the
individual pages, which would then tend to become fixed.
Anyway, I asked this question on the mediawiki-l list:
“I’d be interested to hear anybody’s thoughts on the best way to
construct a large FAQ in mediawiki. I can see some advantage in
having lots of short pages, perhaps even one Q&A per page, in terms of being
able to assign categories and create an automatic index that way. But
that makes it difficult to browse and scroll around when you’re not
sure what you’re looking for.
So I’m leaning towards having several long pages each containing related Q&As
The main index page would then link to these pages, but ideally would
also list just the titles from each of the Questions in the other
pages.
So I’d like to generate a kind of Table Of Contents (TOC) for a set of pages, perhaps but I can’t see how to do that at present.”
Not receiving any replies, I did some more research. Mediawiki’s own
FAQ consists of a single long page with a two tiered table of
contents. This seems to be pretty standard, and is the same as has
been developing organically on my site. Interestingly
though, the current mediawiki FAQ is a shorter version of one which was earlier
hosted on another site.
When researching muti-page FAQs I came across this pattern more than
once. A FAQ is started up, it grows, then it gets to a point where it
is considered too big and some change occurs. This would appear to be a classic quantity into quality transformation.
For example
Q Where’s the old FAQ!?!
A The former multi-page FAQ grew too large, and for release 0116, it
has been dispersed throughout the reference.”
So whilst I’m still on the look out for a good format for a multi-page
FAQ, I’m beginning to suspect that this is only a short-lived
transitional form, in which case it may be possible to skip straight
on to or at least prepare for, the next developmental stage.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
Andy, you might find some of the notes we took on creating the KM4Dev wiki (on the wiki) for making a community FAQ useful.
The FAQ index is here http://www.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ_Index
The notes are here http://www.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/FAQIntro
FAQ design for longevity
Andy Roberts posted some questions about designing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages to a couple mailing lists and to his blog. Specifically, he was looking for advice on structuring long FAQ’s. Here are some of my thoughts.
Just be careful… And think it over.
Upgrading_MediaWiki