FAQ
A/an FAQ is a curated list of questions and answers intended to address aspects about a subject that are important or often unknown or misunderstood. It is an acronym that expands to "frequently asked questions" or "frequently asked question". Although either expansion implies that questions are asked frequently, often they are not. FAQ is more about the question-answer format and an indication of the relevance of the content. Each question might be conglomerated from multiple actual questions, what the author anticipates a reader might wonder about or is simply a way to organize information.[1]
Even though FAQ is commonly used and understood, the term has several grammatical ambiguities:
- Two pronunciations
- The pronunciation is either as a word (fack) or as each letter (F-A-Q).[2] As such, the indefinite article used is either "a" for the former or "an" for the latter. As both pronunciations are correct, either article is correct.
- Two expansions
- Oddly for an acronym, it can expand to either of two phrases. The plural form (questions) is the more commonly-used, yet the singular (question) is also used.
- Usually a list
- A common use of FAQ is to refer to a list of question-answer pairs. In this sense, the term is singular (a list) yet the expansion is plural (multiple questions).[3]
- Plural form
- The term "FAQs" generally refers to multiple FAQ lists.[4] But, if the implied expansion is singular (question), then FAQs could mean multiple questions.
Q&A
[edit]While the term FAQ is relatively recent, its format is the same as the older concept of Q&A: question and answer. For example, Matthew Hopkins wrote The Discovery of Witches in 1648 as a list of questions and answers, introduced as "Certaine Queries answered ...".[5] Many old catechisms are in a Q&A format. Summa Theologica, written by Thomas Aquinas in the second half of the 13th century, is a series of common questions about Christianity to which he wrote a series of replies.
Origin
[edit]The FAQ is an Internet tradition originating from limitations of early mailing lists from NASA in the early 1980s. The first FAQ developed over several pre-Web years, starting from 1982 when storage was expensive. On ARPANET's SPACE mailing list, the presumption was that new users would download archived past messages through FTP. In practice this rarely happened, and the users tended to post questions to the mailing list instead of searching its archives. Repeating the "right" answers became tedious, and went against developing netiquette. A series of different measures were set up by loosely affiliated groups of computer system administrators, from regularly posted messages to netlib-like query email daemons. The acronym FAQ was developed between 1982 and 1985 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list.[1] The format was then picked up on other mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. Posting frequency changed to 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.[6] Eugene Miya experimented with the first daily FAQ.
Over time, the accumulated FAQs across all Usenet newsgroups sparked the creation of the "*.answers" moderated newsgroups such as comp.answers, misc.answers and sci.answers for crossposting and collecting FAQ across respective comp.*, misc.*, sci.* newsgroups.
On the web
[edit]A FAQ is included in some websites. As part of web design, a FAQ can help achieve goals of customer service and search engine optimization (SEO) including reducing the workload of in-person customer service employees, improving site navigation, increasing the visibility of the website by matching/optimizing for specific search terms and linking to or integrating within product pages.[7]
Non-traditional
[edit]In some cases, informative documents not in the traditional FAQ-style are billed as FAQs, particularly the video game realm, which is often a detailed description of gameplay, including tips, secrets, and beginning-to-end guidance.[8] Rarely are videogame FAQs in a question-answer format, although they may contain a short section of questions and answers.[citation needed]
Criticism
[edit]Some content providers discourage the use of FAQs in place of restructuring content under logical headings. For example, the UK Government Digital Service does not use FAQs because the service believes that their form primarily serves writers' needs and creates more work for readers.[9]
References
[edit]- ^ a b Hersch, Russ. FAQs about FAQs Archived 2022-01-23 at the Wayback Machine. 8 January 1998. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/ Archived 2022-01-23 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ "About FAQs: Pronunciation". Faqs.org. Archived from the original on 2022-01-23. Retrieved 2013-06-13.
- ^ "FAQ". Archived from the original on May 30, 2013. Retrieved May 30, 2013.
- ^ "OFAC FAQs: Question Index". United States Department of the Treasury. Archived from the original on May 13, 2013. Retrieved May 30, 2013.
- ^ Hopkins, Mathew (1648). The Discovery of Witches: In Answer to severall QUERIES, LATELY Delivered to the Judges of Assize for the County of NORFOLK. And now published By MATTHEW HOPKINS, Witch-finder, FOR The Benefit of the whole KINGDOME. London: Angell in Ivie Lane. p. 1. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
- ^ Jef Poskanzer (Oct 31, 1989). "Frequently asked questions - weekly automated posting". Newsgroup: comp.graphics. Retrieved May 20, 2022.
- ^ Kumar, Braveen (Aug 3, 2016). "The Benefits of an FAQ Page (And How to Do It Right)". Shopify. Archived from the original on February 17, 2019. Retrieved February 16, 2019.
- ^ Teti, John (9 September 2010). "What the FAQ?". Eurogamer. Gamer Network. Archived from the original on 22 July 2014. Retrieved 21 July 2014.
- ^ Richards, Sarah (25 July 2013). "FAQs: why we don't have them". Government Digital Service. Archived from the original on 2020-03-01.
External links
[edit]